Good handwriting: an unfair advantage!

Here’s a little secret from someone who has assessed thousands of examination answer scripts. Handwriting creates an unfair bias either towards the examinee or against him/her.

That is a sad truth. Some of the most brilliant minds I have interacted with in life (professors, researchers, students and professionals) have such a pathetic hand, it is a small wonder that they made it through grade school. I digress only to reassure you—in case you are dissatisfied with your hand—that you too might have seeds of genius in you!

Back to why good handwriting gives you a positive edge over others in the essay paper. It has to do with one elementary fact about examiners. They are human. Examiners are usually assigned hundreds of scripts that have to be graded within a tight schedule. Beyond a point, their attention naturally begins to wobble, drained by hours of evaluating (mostly) bad prose.

Now, given these constraints, examiners tend to rely on first impressions rather too frequently. If your handwriting is legible, regular and consistent; if your margins are straight, and you haven’t smudged ink and crossed out too many sentences, the examiner would be charmed into reading on.

But with a bad hand, even a George Orwell may not receive a fair share of the examiner’s attention.