Pen/Pencil?

[HarveyD]

Just confirming: Use pen for this exam yeah? (with the exception of graphs)

[thatisanote]

? I'll be using pencil for all I think - we can do that right?


pre-post edit: yep, black or blue pen is what it says.

[soopertaco]

I used pencil on mid year and i was fine. But if you're cool with using pen then I guess that's your preference!

[HarveyD]

I prefer pencil, but I assumed it was safer to use pen...
hmm

[thatisanote]

I prefer pencil, but I assumed it was safer to use pen...
hmm

I had a look at the cover (for 2011, avail on vcaa site), and it says
write all answers in blue or black pen

[soopertaco]

I prefer pencil, but I assumed it was safer to use pen...
hmm

I had a look at the cover (for 2011, avail on vcaa site), and it says
write all answers in blue or black pen

They say that but during mid years there was no emphasis made by the supervisors/teachers about the use of pens. I used a pencil in mid years and I still managed to get a mark back. Just think about it this way: I don't think there are any exam police from vcaa intercepting every exam before they get to the assessors and the assessors exist to give you as many marks as you've earned. Just say you did write in pencil rather than pen as it says on the cover, I highly doubt that they're going to penalise you when they can clearly see perfectly correct answers written down on your paper unless you get a really cold hearted assessor/ marker. SO yeah that's my logic.

moral of the story use whatever you like lol

[HarveyD]

nah im not worried about that lol
more about whether it would scan properly
because I dont think assessors would make the effort to see what you wrote originally if the pencil didnt come through, since they specified using pen

anyway i think i'll use pen for explanations and pencil for graphs, probably the best option

[Lasercookie]

Bruce Walsh (chief assessor) talks about online marking from 4:30 onwards here.
http://www.vicphysics.org/documents/events/aip2011/C1BruceWalshed.mp3

At 5:10 he starts talking about pencils. I've transcribed it here:

Pencils seem to have been okay, there didn't seem to be any trouble with pencils. So as long as it was a decent pencil, not really faint. But I'm not saying pencil because it wasn't stated. Any student who wrote in red, green, purple - it just doesn't scan. It won't appear on the page. Occasionally the assessor looking at it says 'I reckon there's something else here that I'm not seeing' and gets sent through for the paper to be pulled out and re-scanned in colour or for us to have a look at separately. But you can't rely on that. Really encourage your students to write in blue or black pen. That may be getting changed to pencil this year [it hasn't]. The only difficulty with pencils is that if they with a hard pencil and then rub it out and then rewrite things, the hard pencil tends to be scanned in as well - even though that it's been rubbed out.

So you "can" risk using pencil, just don't use a hard pencil (2H etc.). HB or softer should be alright.

edit: fixed typo. Also, I'll be using pen with pencil for graphs (writing that I used pencil in pen above each graph).

[soopertaco]

okay true true i might actually use pen for explanations now then haha

[dc302]

Gah I still don't understand how people can possibly do maths/write anything in pencil... stopped using pencil for good in grade 4 i think