Student blogs

While for undergrads university means plenty of tests and homework, PhD students spend long hours marking their work. If you’re the one submitting solutions, these are ten ways to annoy the marker.

1. Write your solutions in random places of the page. Don’t waste any space – make sure that this little gap in the middle of question 1 is filled with your answer to question 3.
2. Use a pencil or, even better, a red pen. Don’t forget about correction fluid! Surely the instructions to write only in black or blue were just a joke.
3. Provide a few answers to the same question, with a comment: “Choose the correct one”. Remember that your markers have infinite amount of time, so make sure they have something to do during long, dark evenings.
4. Use your own variation of English. Include expressions such as “Spoze”, “Cuz”, because they make marking more entertaining – and your work looks more professional.
5. Don’t explain your steps. Let the marker enjoy solving the puzzle herself.
6. Make your answers completely illegible. Don’t allow the marker to be narrow-minded enough to study only one subject, encourage her to discover secrets of graphology.
7. When you have to prove something and your result happens to have the opposite sign to the desired one, just change the sign and draw a smiley face next to the answer. Surely this charming smile will give you points.
8. Answer the question with “this was proven in lectures”. So clever, surely the lecturer didn’t want you to solve it from scratch!
9. Copy your answer from a friend. To make the effect better, you both should submit the paper together, so that the marker reads your solutions consecutively. We like playing detectives and figuring out who copied from whom.
10. Find your marker’s office and visit her to complain about your mark. When she suggests discussing the problem, say that you lost the paper and you just want a higher mark.

If you stick to these rules, the marker definitely won’t be on your side. You might want to consider it next time 🙂 Now back to marking!

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