I guess that BJ and I might ever stand accused of schadenfreude, as we delight occasionally in others’ mistakes in various documents. But I couldn’t help but note the recent article in the Times about an annual ‘exam howlers’ competition.
Here are but a few examples:
- the politics student at Bristol who remarked that the US had the most advanced fighting forces in the world, possessing “highly developed and powerful marital equipment”
- the biology student at Staffordshire University, who submitted a paper on “The Science of Gnomes” – when the topic was supposed to have been “The Science of Genomes”
- the final-year student’s commentary on a medieval French poem, which observed “that all of the sentences end in a coma”.