Saga of lost exams ends well at KU Leuven

The industrial engineering students took the exam on Monday and were told of the problem on Wednesday. It turned out that cleaning staff had accidentally thrown away the box of exam papers that was on the lecturer’s desk.

Students responded angrily to having to retake the exam. “It would have been a better solution to give us all the same mark,” student Nick Melis told VRT. “I find it just ridiculous that we now have to retake the exam.”

“We can hardly give them marks at random,” said Rik Gosselink, vice-rector of student policy. “We have given the students several possible opportunities to retake the exam, so they can fit it into their exam schedules.”

The university assumed the papers had ended up in a container and considered them irretrievably lost. However, technical services tracked down the container in which the papers had ended up. “The exams were recovered and will be marked in the normal manner, so the students will not have to retake the exam,” Gosselink said yesterday. “We very much regret that the exams were not recovered earlier.”

Photo by Rob Stevens/KU Leuven