Good news for LPC students at Liverpool John Moores University whose business law and practice (BLP) exam was terminated two thirds of the way through last week by a faulty fire alarm: they won’t be required to re-sit the exam, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has confirmed today.
Having giving serious thought to making students re-do the paper, the SRA has decided instead to use what it describes as “a complicated mathematical formula” to calculate students’ marks on the basis of what they had already completed before they were evacuated from the exam hall.
With the approximately 50 affected students having completed two hours and ten minutes of the three-hour exam, the SRA is confident it can “ensure all are treated fairly” as it applies its formula.
According to an SRA spokesperson, the decision was arrived at after it emerged that a concurrent BLP exam for John Moores LPC students with special needs had been uninterrupted by the fire alarm. “Under such circumstances it would have been unfair to ask students to re-sit,” an SRA spokesperson told Legal Cheek.
While unexpected interruptions of exams are rare, law schools are required to have written procedures in place to deal with them.
There’s more on exams in my piece for Guardian Law this week – to be published shortly.