The students who submitted these exam sheets don’t seem to have answered the questions very accurately. It’s not a bad idea to start by figuring out what the answers should have been:
Here are the exam sheets again for reference:
Looking more closely at the rather tactless comments left by the grader, the capital letters in the given order spell COMBINE, which suggests we should combine the content of the seven exam sheets onto one. This is worth trying, but it yields the following, which doesn’t obviously provide any information (and any temptation to read the result in 5-bit binary should hopefully be discouraged by the 27 in row 4):
Without any other clear way to proceed, it might occur to the solver to check the grader’s work. Doing so reveals that the 2nd, 5th, and 7th exams have the correct percentage of correct answers written down, but the others do not; the percentages imply that they should have 5, 5, 9, and 5 correct answers respectively, but instead they have 7, 11, 6, and 8. What happened? A hint to what’s going on lies in the content of the exam questions, every one of which relates to either the phrase “upside down” or an instance of an object or person being upside down:
This pattern, along with the “SCANOMATIC” logo implying the exams were computer-graded, suggests turning the incorrectly graded exams upside down (rotating them 180 degrees, not reflecting vertically) and grading them as if they were right side up in that orientation; the inverted exams now have the correct percentage of questions right, so they must have been entered into the grading machine upside down, as shown:
Having turned these exams to reflect what was graded, it may be time to “combine” again, which results in the following overlap:
This is still not crystal clear, but the F near the top stands out (in the same orientation as the grader comments) and this will hopefully convince the solver to rotate the array 90 degrees counterclockwise and read one letter in every three columns. Doing so reveals the puzzle’s answer, FLUNKED. (Note: The F and L are capitalized to improve legibility, particularly since every column must have at least one filled-in bubble. No statement about the educational standards of the state of Florida is implied by this puzzle. Voting machine standards, maybe.)