Students shamed with list of exam blunders

University students have been shamed with a list of exam blunders including references to "escape goats" and claims that the railways were invented to relieve pressure on motorways. Among the gems from this year's undergraduate exams are an economics student at City University in London student who attributed Northern Rock's downfall to the "laxative enforcement policies".

In literature, a student from Bath Spa University wrote of Margaret Atwood's book: "The Handmaid's Tale shows how patriarchy treats women as escape goats."

A University of Southampton student concerned by global warming wrote that: "Tackling climate change will require an unpresidented response." And a fellow undergraduate concerned by the threat of diseases, wrote: "Control of infectious diseases is very important in case an academic breaks out."



Other examples come from students at St Helens College of Art and Design near Liverpool, who were asked to "outline the importance of the four Noble Truths to the Buddhist faith". One offered the baffling response: "Nirvana cannot be described because there are no words in existence for doing so. Not non-existence either, it is beyond the very ideas of existing and not existing."

Students at the same university were asked to outline the importance of the railway in 19th-century Britain. One wrote: "The railways were invented to bring the Irish from Dublin to Liverpool where they were promptly arrested for being vagrants", while another responded: "The railways were invented to take the weight off the motorways."

A student at the University of the West of England in Bristol astonished his tutor by spelling the subject of one of his favourite topics wrong: "alchol" instead of "alcohol". Another wrote "whom" instead of "womb" in an anatomy paper, and one replaced the word "abdominal" with "abominous".