The students taking Biology 100 at the University of Kansas were on their game this week. All 923 of them aced Monday’s exam. Perfect scores for everyone!
There were a lot of happy faces in Lawrence—until the students realized that the “clicker” system used to give the tests had crashed, erasing scores for the entire class, reports today’s University Daily Kansan. The instructor’s only option was to give each student an equal score of 100 percent.
Clickers are handheld, remote-control-like devices that let instructors pose multiple-choice questions and students immediately answer by clicking one choice. This particular system was made by the company eInstruction.The university says it does not know the cause of the malfunction, but it is investigating. The system had not failed before.
Nancy Holcroft, the biology lecturer, decided to give all students equal scores because of the glitch, but she was not happy about it. “Knowing that 900 exam scores have just disappeared into the ether is not a particularly nice sensation,” Holcroft told the newspaper.
And she isn’t going to be using clickers for exams again anytime soon. —Josh Fischman
