UCL leaks paper, finds out after exam

Turns out Imperial isn’t the only London uni to routinely fuck up exams, neither is it the worst at it. Last week at UCL a mechanical engineering exam had to be rescheduled after the department realised it had accidentally leaked the paper.

Students were contacted by their department a day after sitting their thermofluids exam and were notified that they’d have to do a resit later in the month.

In an apologetic statement sent out by the department on behalf of Prof. Alistair Greig, department deputy head, students were told that there had been “a breach of security”. The department informed students that the contents of the paper had been inadvertently shared on Moodle and as a result “following consultation with the Faculty of Engineering Sciences, UCL Examinations Section and UCL Registrar, it has been decided that the examination for this paper will be rescheduled. All students who were expected to sit the MECH203P exam yesterday will be expected to sit the rescheduled exam”

Moodle is a learning platform designed to facilitate sharing and is broadly used by several education institutions, very much like blackboard. Companies and institutions that use Moodle include hell, London School of Economics, State University of New York, Microsoft and the Open University.

Naturally students are less than pleased. One mechanical engineering student in their second year who would prefer to stay anonymous told felix that many students “are furious about the decision”. The student explains that the professor responsible for the leak released a mock exam paper onto moodle as a word file which meant that students could view the file’s editing history. “It turns out, he simply edited the actual exam paper to make the mock paper. This meant that it was theoretically possible for us to have viewed the exam paper before the exam.”

“Most people were not even aware that we could access the file’s edit history. It was only after the exam that on our Mechanical Engineering Whatsapp groupchat , it was revealed that someone had discovered this.”

The students have been given 18 days notice to once again revise for the subject. For many this resit will be on top of up to eight exams that May is already packed with.

The department claims to be trying to prevent clashes with other projects on the affected students’ timetables however communications so far don’t’ seem to have addressed concerns about wellbeing and academic performance

This has prompted students to accuse UCL of having “no empathy for their students… scrambling to contain this disaster” instead, feeling that their university is being “run as a corporation, rather than an inclusive educational institution”. We have contacted UCL for comment but have not yet received a reply.