Check and circle marks in test papers While watching anime, especially ones that focus on slice-of-life or high school, I often come across a test paper containing a character's score. However, it is interesting to note that the correct answers are circled while the wrong ones are ticked (checked?). As far as I know, ticks are for correct answers and circles are for incorrect answers (unless I've been living in a shell, which would be embarrassing).



The image is from The World God Only Knows OVA: Four Girls and an Idol, where Keima Katsuragi intentionally placed an incorrect answer for question #1. As you can see, it is checked while the rest are circled. Does this mirror how Japan marks the test papers of students? If so, why?
Yes, this does mirror how Japan marks the test papers of students. Let's see an example each of a marked test paper in anime and in real life Japan:





Circles and crosses indicate right and wrong answers, but you'll often see check marks used in place of crosses to save time and effort. Check marks are sometimes called reten for bearing resemblance to the katakana re, but should not be confused with the return marker reten that annotate Classical Chinese. Check marks call forth the attention of students to incorrect answers, which they should check again.

The check mark as an error mark also sees usage in countries like Korea and Sweden, but as you can gather from the discussions on Reddit and Wikipedia, there really is no universal standard for marking right and wrong answers even within a country. The graders may choose whatever the mark they want. My teachers in school thought that ticking off wrong answers wastes too much ink, so they just cheaply impressed a dot by the wrong answers.

Occasionally, you might also encounter the flower circle, double circle and triangle marks, which denote, respectively, perfect, good and average (poor) work done by the students.