Getting Testy

“Time is up! Stop writing immediately!” admonishes a serious, bespectacled old lady at 5:15 p.m. from the front of Lowell Lecture Hall. To the exam-weary student, she’s just another onerous part of an altogether unhappy experience—an enemy who clearly does not understand the importance of those extra five seconds.

Wrong. She’s probably been calling time professionally for about 40 years. Exam proctors are hired by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Office of the Registrar—and while many of them are Harvard graduate students, a huge number are retired schoolteachers.

Often, they hear about the opportunity to proctor exams through retiree groups or by word of mouth and are anxious to relive the “experience of going into a classroom,” says Field Manager of Exams and Registrar Services Mike Fournier. In many cases, Fournier explains, they just enjoy being around students. He recalls a proctor who was overjoyed to see a student she one of her former high school students, who had been in her sophomore history class. But sometimes the age of the retirees-turned-proctors can make for a precarious situation, he says. For example, there was one unfortunate incident in which an 82-year-old woman fell and broke her arm while proctoring an exam.

Many students say they think proctors waste time with their lengthy exam introductions, but Fournier (who does acknowledge that some of the proctors are oddballs) insists that it’s their job: “The proctors are required to read a statement out of the handbook and it’s quite lengthy. They’re required to read it verbatim,” he says. Although some experienced proctors have developed abbreviated introductions, many new proctors follow the rules to the letter.

One proctor many students remember long after their exams are over is Vincent “Vin” DeNovellis. Every year, DeNovellis’ unique safety concerns amuse lecture halls full of nervous students. This year in Literature and Arts C-55, “Surrealism,” DeNovellis “[went] on for about 5 minutes about emergency room procedures…about walking out of the room without talking to anybody, single file, kindergarten fire-drill procedures,” says Neilesh Mutyala ’04. “People were laughing out loud but the guy was oblivious to it.”

Fournier says the process for hiring proctors is a careful one. He sets up an interviews with proctoring candidates to “get a feel for them” and make sure that they are “somewhat competent.” He then matches them to exams based on their schedules. Candidates must prove a professional background.

Not just anyone can hand out a blue book at Harvard.