Exam howlers wanted

Buffet zone: not what you might find in post-war Eastern Europe

If so, then you might as well stop reading now.

But if they don’t you could be a potential winner of Times Higher Education’s “exam howlers” competition.

Every year after exam marking season is over we ask lecturers to share their favourite mistakes, misunderstandings and malapropisms.

In 2012, Kevin Ruane, professor of modern history at Canterbury Christ Church University, offered this winning entry from one of his undergraduate students: “In 1945, Stalin began to build a buffet zone in Eastern Europe.”

Meanwhile, David Ganz, emeritus professor in palaeography at King’s College London, was amused by one student’s insistence that in the Middle Ages “most books were written on valium” rather than vellum.

However, in some cases, the mistakes beg the question whether the students are aware of what they are doing.

Writing in an exam last year on the biology of sperm, one student described the 18th-century Italian naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani as a “priest cum scientist”, according to David Hosken, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Exeter.

And in another lewd example from 2009, an academic was told about a film being made undercover “to draw attention to human rights abuses in the Best Wank and Gaza”.

Due to the annual event’s popularity, we have extended the deadline for this year’s entries until 12 July at 5pm.

For your chance to be crowned the winner of this competition – which comes with a magnum of champagne – please send examples of hilarious typos, unfortunate spoonerisms and daft misunderstandings to john.elmes@tsleducation.com.