7°C, clear 7 rather windy.
Entrance Exams today: which was a time to examine human behaviour quite closely. The questions were in a booklet and answers written on omr sheets which need a simple pencil mark in the right place. A colleague and I were assigned to invigilate a group of 24 and in the last part noticed a common mistake. When the pupils turned the page for section three, they often began writing their answers in section four. Now these are not daft girls, they are all at least reasonably bright, very young, but with a bit of a sparkle nontheless.
Standing there quietly observing led me to think about the same error made so many times. fortunately for the girls- we spotted their mistakes without their losing any time- they were quick to transfer their answers into the right places ( costing no more than a minute or two).
there is somethign in human behaviour that is slewing the methods of this exam- something about reading intensly, using specialist skills in the mind and then making a physical movement to turn overleaf.
My solution- what about something like a scroll- or a convertina sheet where the answers are just written down and down the page, with the top folding up in a concertina fashion. that would also be easier to feed into the omr reader
OMR = optical mark reader, automated input of data to a computer.
Micycle 