Top exam howlers – from Times Higher Education

These are from Times Higher Education, UK. US bibliobloggers, do you have any good bloops, blunders, or gaffs to share?

The “Google generation” finds it hard to imagine life before the world wide web, it seems. A student of Leo Enticknap, lecturer in cinema at the University of Leeds, explained that a political group “used the internet to publicise their cause, just like the French Resistance did during the Second World War”.

On the other side of the pond, when David Null, an emeritus professor at California State Polytechnic University, asked his class to write about the person they most admired, he was impressed to receive an essay on Martin Luther.

It turned out to be a mishmash of facts about a 16th-century Protestant reformer, who miraculously also managed to head up the American civil rights movement of the 1960s, some four centuries later.

Meanwhile, a biology student spent an entire paper telling Kevin Reiling, from the Faculty of Sciences at Staffordshire University, about the science of gnomes.

“It took me a while to realise she was referring to genomes,” Dr Reiling remarked.

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