In the late 1980s, I was a co-examiner with Bill McCarthy for the special diplomas in social studies and social policy that were taken by students at Plater College, an institution in Oxford offering further education courses (a little like Ruskin College but with a Roman Catholic tradition). Not all the students were academically strong, but the college offered wonderful opportunities for people who had missed out on education earlier in life.
Bill was a passionate advocate of its mission. At one examiners' meeting, a student had done a very poor exam paper and the marker – a don at a very traditional Oxford college – had awarded the script a "delta" grade. This was the worst mark possible, and its effect was to assure the failure of the candidate, irrespective of whether she or he had passed the other papers for the qualification.
Bill took the paper from the marker, read it, and asked him "Do you consider the candidate's answer to be contumelious?" (a criterion for this degree of failure, as I recall). When the marker, somewhat flustered, asked what that meant, Bill replied that in the absence of a basic critical vocabulary he was hardly in a position to judge as wanting a candidate whose educational opportunities had been significantly less privileged than his own. The mark was raised, by consensus, to "gamma" and the candidate passed.