No. 204

My teacher’s assistant came to me with disturbing news. I could hear something like fear in her voice.

“Abby, I finished marking the last of those tests, but when I put the grades into the computer I noticed something peculiar with the results in B-Block. I’ve already double checked all of the previous marks and there’s something you should see.”

I put down my pen and accepted the laptop from Erin. I looked at the ordered bars on the grading chart of one of the girls in the class.

“I don’t see anything here,” I told her.

Erin nodded. “We’ve been entering the marks as ‘X points out of Y’, so you’ll see all the different values, but when I change it to display in percent, look at what happens.”

She clicked the appropriate button and all of the numbered scores changed to their representative percentages.

“Kendra’s got a 93 on each thing she’s turned in so far?” I said. “What are the odds of that?”

“This is what’s really unsettling,” said Erin. She expanded the results from one student, to all of them.

The phenomena of Kendra’s results were repeated across the board. Though the tallies differed from individual to individual, every student had the same percentages for all of their assignments.

I gasped. “That’s got to be a glitch.”

Erin shook her head. “It’s not a glitch. I looked back at the papers we haven’t handed back. These are correct.”

 “How many ways could this happen?” I wondered aloud.

Erin was just about to reply when we heard a hollow knock at the classroom door. I opened it to find all the students from B-Block in the hall.

“Hello, Miss Roling,” they said in unison.