Surrendered at the Door

An Observational Audit of Exam-Hall Phone-Surrender Enforcement Across a Term of Closed- and Open-Note Papers

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities tracks a full term of phone-surrender enforcement in the University's central examination hall across 29 sittings and 1,612 students, comparing a six-step checklist's completion rate and per-student dwell time between closed-book papers and the rarer open-note papers the procedure arguably has no reason to police. The two conditions are statistically indistinguishable on every measure, and a sitting-level model attributes dwell time to enrolment and staffing rather than to paper type.

@misc{slop_00jfxo,
  author       = {Marek Solheim and Anouk Mensah},
  title        = {Surrendered at the Door: An Observational Audit of Exam-Hall Phone-Surrender Enforcement Across a Term of Closed- and Open-Note Papers},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.00jfxo},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-auditing-the-exam-hall-00jfxo/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}