University of Cambridge's School of Clinical Medicine

A serious clerical error has led to a number of second-year Medical and Veterinary students being awarded incorrect marks.

Approximately eighty students have had their results in the Part IB module “Mechanisms of Drug Action” (MODA) adjusted to rectify the error, which students were told as caused by two candidate numbers being “misread”, leading to a “frame shift”.

In a message sent out to students by Dr Graham Ladds, Senior Examiner for the MODA module, Dr Ladds said “we have recently discovered an issue with the 2nd MB/Vet MB mark book for MoDA which affects the marks for Paper I for about a quarter of the class. We were alerted to an issue by a DoS who queried a student's mark and, on investigation, the spreadsheet error was found.

“Paper I was marked electronically, externally, and the candidate numbers in the spreadsheet returned to us did not match the one we used for processing the marks.  When we imported the marks there was a misalignment for a block of candidates.”

Students of the Medical and Veterinary Science Tripos must pass every constituent module, alongside their overall Tripos mark. The erroneous pass/fail results for MODA were released last week.

Sixteen candidates have had their grades amended from fails to passes, or vice versa. All students whose pass/fail grade has been changed have been notified, and everyone who has been affected received their corrected mark by Tuesday morning.

Speaking to Varsity, Alex Ridley, a second-year Vet who was incorrectly told that she had failed MODA, said “Everyone is very frustrated by this and rightly so - it’s stressful enough having the pressure of passing five modules as well as getting a good tripos mark without them messing it up.


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“It took them six days to let us know about the mistake, which is six days in which some people will have been unjustly worried about having to do the resits and some people will have been celebrating and telling people they passed when really they didn’t. When I got the email today telling me that I had actually passed, not failed, I was incredibly happy but also very frustrated that something like this could happen and that I had to go through six days of thinking and telling people I had failed.”

A spokesperson for the University of Cambridge said: "A small number of students have been affected by an issue with the processing of externally marked exam papers. We corrected the error which resulted in a small number of students failing the exam and a larger number passing when they had originally failed. The majority of marks will remain identical to those originally reported. Students whose grade has changed have been notified via their college tutor. We apologise to all those affected by something which was unfortunately out of our control and we will take this issue up with the external marking body to ensure that this error is not replicated in future years."