A few reasons to hate the OAS (Optical Answer Sheet) or OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) sheet during examinations:

1) If you have a super long name, you'll still be shading your name and IC number while the rest of your classmates have started on their paper

2) You're always paranoid that you didn't shade dark enough; so you bring at least a 2B pencil and shade your answers vigorously, until ...

3) You shade a wrong answer and have to use your rubber to erase an answer

4) You're paranoid that the answer you rubbed off is still visible, rub harder

5) You accidentally tear your OAS

6) Your world crumbles

7) The nightmare is worse for left-handers who constantly smudge answers with their hand and they develop silver-surfer hands:

Lovers of the OAS

But there is a select number of students in Singapore who may love OAS during examinations.

They are the eagle-eyed and enterprising students who think 'Why study? Someone else can do that for me!'

Yes, you guessed it. Cheaters love OAS because it helps them copy answers from others in a rather efficient way.

It is just a matter of recognising the snaking patterns and replicating it on their own OAS.

The Thai answer to cheaters

Someone in Thailand has just devised a devious way to foil the plans of cheaters. Depending on who you ask, this is actually brilliant or torturous:

Not sure how the scantron machine can be calibrated to read this sheet though. And not to mention how many blur students will mess up their own shading with this new circular design.

It would be close to impossible for students to copy answers as the circular pattern makes it hard to see which question those answers correspond to. Unless you truly have the eyes of a hawk.

But at least left-handers will not suffer any longer.

Top image from MOE

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