In what must have seemed like a surprise gift from some sort of Exam Santa, 190 Ryerson chemistry students opened their multiple-choice exams Dec. 9 to discover a bonus clipped to the back — the answers to the first 20 questions.

No one will ever know how many took advantage of the windfall in the minutes that followed, before an honest soul reported the gaffe to professors overseeing the 50-question exam. Officials immediately asked all 1,000 students writing it in the cavernous Metro Toronto Convention Centre to put down their pens and wait, baffled, while they gathered up the cheat sheets and grappled with what to do next.

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“It’s a professor’s nightmare, like students have nightmares of showing up naked to exams,” said psychology professor John Turtle, secretary of Ryerson’s Senate. “We put a lot of resources and thought into security, but things happen.”

In fact, a professor had inadvertently printed off an answer sheet for one of the three versions of the exam that are printed up to make it hard for students to copy from each other. The sheet had accidentally been handed out with 190 exam booklets, but this was not explained to the students at the time, while professors raced to weigh their options.

“It was a difficult situation,” recalled chemistry professor Darrick Heyd. “We wanted to minimize the impact of having a tainted exam; to balance fairness with academic integrity.”

Should they scrap the exam for everyone? That wouldn’t be fair for the 800 who never got an answer sheet, said Heyd, and were probably keen to get the exam over with.

Should they dismiss all 190 who did get the answer sheet? That would cause a huge distraction for others, and after all, “maybe there hadn’t been enough time for students to take advantage of the answers anyway,” noted Heyd, Ryerson’s associate dean of undergraduate science and student affairs.

In the end, they chose to have students pick up their pens and carry on, then see if the marks suggested any academic hanky-panky.

Indeed, when the marks were crunched, it turned out enough of the 190 students did noticeably better on the first 20 questions than on the rest to suggest some had given into temptation.

“People are people, and we put a big temptation in their hands,” admitted Heyd. “We realized those first 20 answers on those 190 exams were tainted, so we only counted the last 30 questions and that became their mark.”

University officials emailed all the students in CHY102 and let them know what had happened, why there had been an interruption and what the university had decided.

Those who are upset with that mark can write a fresh exam in January, he noted, and so far about 45 have said they will.

Some of the 800 who did not get the answer sheet complained this make-up test gives cheaters another edge — more time to study.

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But Heyd argued there’s no reason to have all 800 rewrite an exam whose integrity was never in question, and there’s no reason not to let the 190 rewrite an exam that was tainted through no fault of their own.

Still, those who write it in January won’t get to choose which mark will count — it will be the January mark that stands.

“So there’s a risk involved to taking it again — nobody gets a free ride here,” he said. “It’s very difficult to come up with a solution that pleases everyone, but we felt that if we didn’t let the 190 students have the chance to write it again, they could appeal and probably get to write the exam in January anyway.

“But it was an accident. I’m not very happy that students had to be inconvenienced, but we’re trying to resolve it as best we can.”