

This contains spoilers for
[Another](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_%28novel%29), which is somewhat
new (the anime is from 2012).

[Another](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_%28novel%29) is an anime series
about a cursed classroom. The students (and teachers) have designed a
countermeasure to avoid the curse from triggering each year, which consists on
completely ignoring a student (treating them as non-existent). By doing this,
the number of students in the classroom is technically decreased by one, which
makes up for the extra dead student that got mixed in the class.

Misaki is the chosen student to be ignored by the classroom this year. After a
mess up, Sakakibara is also ignored.

However, if I'm not mistaken, during exam periods, **both students (Misaki and
Sakakibara) have exam papers**. Why? Doesn't giving them exam papers pretty
much **acknowledge** that they exist? Doesn't that break the entire
countermeasure? (from the point of view of the classroom)

**Edit**

For clarification: the countermeasure involves people directly related to the
class. This means, students that belong to this classroom _and_ teachers that
teach this class. External students and teachers from other classrooms are not
involved with the curse, so they may interact with the non-existent students
just fine.

The librarian, and students from the art club etc, have no problem interacting
with the non-existent students.

The external students/teachers are not very well aware of the curse though.
The cursed classroom tries not to talk about it with others.


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another
Doesn't letting the non-existent students do exams acknowledge their existence?


This is just a guess, but just because they have exam papers doesn't mean that
the related people gave it to them, nor does it mean that it will get picked
up by people in the class.

What I'm getting at is some other teacher probably handles the curriculum for
the ignored student.


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2013-07-30T03:42:49.947
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That's why success rate of this countermeasure was only 50%. "Sometimes it
worked and sometimes it was completely failed. Sometimes there were obvious
reasons and sometimes reasons were completely unknown." These similar lines
were spoken by chibiki. Although they were ignoring the non-existent, yet
somehow they were being acknowledged at some moments.


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There’s a very possible explanation for how the ignored pupil _get_ their exam
papers. The teachers could just print out five or so spare exam papers ‘in
case they get lost’. Giving it out to the ignored pupil could be avoided by
just leaving the spares on the teacher’s desk and making the ignored pupil get
it themself. Along the same lines, the teacher can ask for the collected
papers to be put on their desk and the ignored pupil just puts their paper on
the same stack before the teacher takes them away.

The main difficulty remains how the teacher is able to _mark_ the entire exam
without unignoring the ignored pupil. But maybe this can be explained by
assuming that the teacher just marks them one by one by one and does not count
the number of papers they marked. So they accidentally mark one exam too much
unknowingly. Or marking is done by other teachers not directly associated with
the class. The latter could fail if that is not a common concept though,
because it would include the other teacher realising there is one extraneous
sheet in there. Unless they don’t know the _actual_ number of pupils in 3-3.


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