Undergrads left angry as staff scramble to draft new paper in time for May exam
Students at one of the country’s top law schools were left reeling when a 2016 exam paper was accidentally uploaded onto Blackboard, two weeks before it was due to be taken.
Lawkward.
The University of Bristol paper stayed on the website for seven hours for all to see before it was eventually taken down.
The cock-up was made worse by the fact that the exam in question was none other than the king of all nightmare law exams — a land law paper.
The error, which happened last week, means a new paper is currently being drafted for the exam on 26 May. The university has assured anxious students that the exam will still take place on the scheduled date, and that the new questions will be put through “all the same quality control checks as the original”.
Head of the law school Professor Joanne Conaghan also apologised — via an email obtained exclusively by Legal Cheek (pictured below) — for any “alarm or inconvenience” the “unfortunate error” may have caused.
When Legal Cheek got in touch with the elite university, a spokesperson told us:
The questions for this year’s land law exam were inadvertently uploaded to Blackboard. They were removed by the law school as soon as the mistake was realised. A new exam paper has been drafted, and has undergone the normal quality control checks and approval by an external examiner. The exam will go ahead as scheduled on May 26, with no risk of unfairness to students.
This isn’t the first time a Russell Group university has made a land law exam blunder. In 2014, Durham students got a nasty surprise when they received the wrong paper in their dreaded land law exam.
Fingers crossed this won’t become a habit.
