Five (not very likely) scenarios
The mystery of the missing exams
1. Mission Impossible
The concierge had a view of the door to the room where the exams were stored and none of the people who had access took the box with them, and yet it’s gone. That can only have happened in one way: an ingenious break-in Mission Impossible-style. Perhaps by a student who really couldn’t use a failing grade, because mum and dad threatened to pull their allowance?
It would be easy as pie for any tech nerd to distract the concierge with a remote-controlled car, hack into any cameras and bypass the door lock. Or maybe they choose the old-fashioned option and lowered themselves down through the ceiling?
Bribery
A variation on scenario 1, but with cold, hard cash instead of gadgets. One of the people who had access to the room - four in total - could have been bribed. A second chance at a passing grade is worth a month’s rent, right?
Pity/Shame
Perhaps so many students failed the exam - mechanics is a notoriously difficult course - that the teacher took pity on them. Poor students, they’ve had such a difficult time because of covid as it is…
Or it could have been shame, of course: maybe the lectures were so incomprehensible that no one learned a thing? Whatever the reason, it’s possible the teacher was inspired by underpaid paperboys everywhere and dumped the whole stack into a lake somewhere.
Coffee
Hard-working people all over the world know: it’s all too easy to spill a cup of coffee over important papers. What if all exams became illegible during grading? It would be hard to confess something like that: better to act as if you never had the exams in the first place.
Recycling
The UG is passionate about waste separation, as anyone knows who has been befuddled by the five different bins found all over the campus. That’s very laudable from a sustainability viewpoint, of course, but what if someone overzealously threw a random box of documents into the waste paper bin?
We’re not certain yet what exactly happened to the exams. But maybe the people at industrial engineering and management can look into our scenarios?