All the Advanced OMR Machines normally used for tests/ exams OMR sheet scanning have a setting for minimum % of darkness of a circle to be valid for acceptance which is set by the user as the machine uses the intensity of the reflected light from each dark spot (i.e. made by carbon / lead of the pencil) filled circle to read your responses. This safeguard is meant just to ignore such erased marks as yours and that is why all the instructions lay stress on filling the full circle poperly / using HB pencil etc. Therefore, very light marks as you are saying normally is ignored by the OMR machne as the makers of OMR machnes and programmers know well that pencil mark will rarely be 100% erasable as in most cases some indication albeit very very light will always remain. . I don’t thnk you have to fear unduly unless your erasing was really clumsy. However, any stray mark made intentionally or otherwise , specially within the readable area, can certainly play havoc with the marking (that is why it is again stressed not to make any stray mark on answers sheets!).
Obviously the Lottery fellows have their own interest in mind and must be setting this minimum acceptable darkness very very low (i.e. near 0.01% or even lower so that even a lght impression left after erasing a response renders your entry invalid) to deprive you of any win even due to erasing only! In fact, the OMR reader can be programmed to be as ‘sensitive’ and ‘responsive’ (or ‘sensible’ as you say) as one wishes to be dependng on the situation and need.
When they said pens down i quickly browsed at my answer sheet hoping to god that all circles were filled in which they were! I noticed that in my rush to get the exam down I didnt 100% fill in some boxes. Some boxes were probbaly 85-90% shaded. Should I be worried?
If I get a band 10 or 9 its probably best getting a manual recount?
I can’t say for sure, but one would assume that if the machine does not get a reading for a particular question that it would flag as an error and then a human would intervene. From there if the human can easily tell that you shaded only one box, you should get your point.
Maybe that’s just me being optimistic, but I can’t see them being that anal about such trivial matters that have no bearing on ethics or your performance on the exam.
@ kid In the AM session , i have done the exact same thing as you.
On one of the Questions, i erased my wrong answer but could not erase it completely (faint mark still remained ; however hard i tried to erase it, in the end i gave up). I marked the correct answer very dark though.
I am worried because i think i can be a borderline pass - Band 10 Candidate and this one mark can potentially spoil my result.
It’s very unlikely there was an error in scantron grading. CFAI has multiple safeguards and the machines are not as dumb as you think.
From the dozens of stories of people paying for a retab, I’ve only heard of 1 rumor of a guy who’s score came back as a total failure when he was ultra confident he did very well. He was the only successful retab I have ever heard of.
I actually have this kinda story this time around. I left exam hall quite confident and thought I easily scored 70%, but imagine my surprise to see 10% score which is waaaay below any Q bank or Mocks I have done. And Wiley’s mocks are the hardest I solved, even harder than Kaplan. compared to Wiley’ mocks, actual exam felt easy, especially PM session for level 2. So I can’t believe my result.
Does the pencil used play a difference? Because I did not use #2 pencil. I used a different one.
Where have you heard it from? And who was the guy? CFA rep just told me on the phone that they never had a failure ever. So it means I will never know the reason for my dismal result…I refuse to believe I failed it due to lack of knowledge. to score bottom 10% one should pretty much guess the entire exam and have 0% knowledge whatsoever…
