Bioengineering lecturer accidentally shares exam paper with students

Last week a lecturer accidentally shared an upcoming exam paper with their first-year bioengineering students.

The unfortunate gaffe occurred during a revision lecture for Molecules, Cells and Processes. During the lecture, a student had a question that was not covered in the section of the revision session.

In order to locate the relevant material, the lecturer opened up the exam on the desktop after having taken out the HDMI connecting the computer to the projector.

Unfortunately the lecture was recorded via Panopto, a College ICT service that allows the recording of a computer screen as well as visual and audio content. The system has been part of IC’s teaching arsenal for years now allowing staff to record live lectures, special events, tutorials and more. When students got back home, they found out that the entire exam they’d be taking the following week was online.

“Yeah naturally we realised pretty quickly what her mistake was,” said a student that prefers to remain anonymous.

Following the realisation of the mistake by the Bioengineering department, the Panopto recording of the revision session was taken down and an email was sent out apologising for the mix-up.

“Several students had viewed the recording by the time we found out, and so the paper and its questions can therefore not be used as this year’s exam and so another paper will be written,” read the email.

The Panopto recording of the revision session will be made available again shortly. In response to enquiries Martyn Boutelle, Director of Courses for Bioengineering said that “a replacement exam paper was fairly straightforward to write as we did not need to devise new problem-based questions that need a lot of testing. The questions were then reviewed internally and by an External Examiner, following our normal procedures. The whole process followed in response to this issue was also approved by an External Examiner.”

Boutelle added that on Wednesday’s revision class “all seemed well” and that students seemed satisfied following their exam on Thursday.