Police on the hunt for exam paper thieves

On the morning of Thursday 11 June 2009, students broke in to the Engineering Undergraduate Office and stole the three TechSci 2 papers due to be sat that week.

The police are investigating the incident and are reviewing the CCTV footage leading up to the break-in.

As a result, the School of Engineering substituted “alternative papers” at short notice. Many students have remarked that these “alternative papers” were very similar to the past papers.

Rumours also circulated that the papers would be scaled dramatically, by as much as 20 per cent. However, Kelly Parkes-Harrison, spokeswoman for the University, said, “The School of Engineering has not decided to scale these papers. The papers will be subject to the normal exam board scrutiny as all other examination papers.”

Some students have complained that the new papers actually favoured those who had done minimal revision.

Jon Greensmith, a second year engineering student, said that although he did not think there was anything else the department could have done, the exams were “unfair on people who had done more revision… People who did the past papers will do better, rather than those who revised the whole module.”

Anouska Nithyanandan, another second year engineer, said that it was “Very unfair that the students have to suffer because the University did not safeguard against the kind of situation… If they’d had a back-up, they could have prepared for this.”

However, Parkes-Harrison said, “It is not normal procedure to create two papers, putting a paper together takes a lot of time and resource and it would not be practical to create an extra paper each time.”

The alternative option open to the Engineering Department was to postpone the TechSci 2 exams until the Autumn, when another set of papers could be prepared and accredited.

Parkes-Harrison said, “Setting replacement papers in September would have been viable for the School, however we believe that it would have caused more expense and inconvenience for our students. Especially those on work placements, on holiday, living a long travelling distance from the university etc. Therefore the replacement papers used were thought to be the best solution given the unfortunate circumstances.”

Indeed, Tom Bradbury, another student affected, said he would definitely not have preferred to sit his exams in September, but thought that this year’s students had “an easy ride” because of the theft.

The police are continuing their investigation into the incident: “Police are investigating a burglary which occurred at Warwick University Campus.

“The incident is believed to have occurred between 1am and 2am on Thursday 11 June. Police inquiries continue. Anyone with information should call Chace Avenue police station on 0845 113 5000.”