Apparently, exam bloopers by history students occur with such frequency and hilarity in Britain that the Times Higher Education Magazine can sponsor an annual competition for the most hysterical howlers.
Have a look at this piece in the Telegraph for some of the choicer specimens, including one student who describes Stalin’s Cold War strategy of constructing a “buffet zone” between his Eastern European Communist empire and the capitalist West. I guess we should be grateful that he doesn’t think that Cold War was a prolonged snowball fight. I wonder what results a similar competition in the US would produce – I fear that we’d probably win, hands down.
It’s all very funny, of course, but we also have to remember that these gems are coming from college history students. You have to be a tad skeptical of their content mastery, I think.
