Student Concentration

So I gave my Physics 20 class their unit exam on Waves the other day. I thought it would be neat to try something to test how students take exams. Here is what I put in the first paragraph of the test, "You may use a calculator for this exam. Be sure to state any formulas you use and be sure to keep track of units in your solutions. Any formulas that you need will be provided for you on the formula sheet. If you have read all of this and get to this last sentence (within the first 5 min), raise your hand and point to the last word in this paragraph and I will give you a mark!" I had 8 out of 24 students notice this and get the extra mark. So this shows me that students don't even take the time to read all the instructions. So no wonder they have problems solving questions...they probably don't even read the whole question. I can remember one of my university prof's doing this with us. Only he stressed reading the whole exam before you started to get an overall idea of what the exam was like and for us to get an idea of how to budget our time. So we had to find the little note somewhere in the whole test to get a mark. My students couldn't even read the first paragraph! Is it that students today don't have the patients? They just want to get in and get out without to much pain. Or is it the form of evaluation? Perhaps there is the pressure that they feel they have to get done in a certain amount of time, therefore, they feel they don't have time for the details.
Maybe this little experiment will teach them to READ the test!
Student Concentration