Someone sent me a video of students taking their exams, then handing in their papers, with one student still at his desk, doing his scratch card lottery, oblivious to time. By the time he went up to the invigilator’s desk to hand in his paper, it was too late: the stern invigilator refused to accept it, saying he was too late.
Student: “Do you know who I am?”
Invigilator: “No.”
The student then inserted his paper somewhere in the middle of the pile and walked off.
This reminds me of something I did when I was doing my MA Linguistics, but in reverse.
The course modules had BA and MA students, and students from different colleges of the University of London. I think this was to save money: pooling students made more budgetary sense.
Under this arrangement, my syntax module had 120 students, which meant 120 homework scripts handed in to the professor every week, and 120 marked scripts to plough through the following week to retrieve your own from the pile on his desk. People would stand there, going through the whole pile, building up a long queue behind. Everyone is held up: the retriever and the others waiting to retrieve.
After the first time this happened, I came up with my own speedy retrieval trick. (Lazy people are very good at finding short cuts…)
I cut off the corner of a coloured envelope (for birthday cards, e.g.), or just a brown one. Any colour but white, which is the same colour as the paper for the homework scripts. I’d then slot this coloured triangle over the top right hand corner of the first sheet of my homework script, and staple it. This would make my script immediately visible from a distance. While people were still going through the pile of 120 scripts, I could just step up and pull mine out within two seconds.
(London, 1992)
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