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Your Best Exam Stories?
KevlarGorilla asks: "I'm sure Slashdot users have done their fair share of university exams. A good portion may be going through the process right now. Many tales have been floating around the internet about cheating (successful and not), cram stories, and tales of post-test celebration, most often in the testing room itself. Recall any first-hand experiences and write them down in a few short paragraphs. If you've been waiting to clear your conscience, or share your experiences, now is the time."
Yep. It was 8:15PM.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Not at university, but I finished a computing exam (and passed) with enough time to program my graphics calculator to play a horse racing game, drawing 4 horses and moving them across the screen at a random speed to determine the winner.
Where it not for the fact that you weren`t allowed to talk I'd have taken bets and set up a small gambling stall
CJC
After the trials and tribulation of Junior and High School I've let a sore spot fester into outright derision for football players. The pose far too many challenges to evolutionary theory and intelligent design.
So ... when I realized a football player for my college team was cheating off my psychology exam I intentionally answered the questions in the multiple choice exam the wrong way. For example: I bubbled the answer to Question 3 in the Question 4 area. After I was done the fooooball player took his exam up to the front of the class and then left.
I then went back and re-positioned my responses in the correct place.
After failing the final the fooooball player saw me on campus and asked me what I got. I said "B" - what did you get? He said "A f*@#in F. How'd do you get a B and I got an F?" I said "I studied." He didn't want to admit to cheating so he just glared at me and walked away.
Add that to your play book!
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Did I mention that I want to teach programming some day?
I should post this on Grouphug!
I'm sure as to how amazing this is but i thought i'd give being one of the first posters a try for a change. This past Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday i had 35 pages of writing due for three different classes. Needless to say it has taken me a while to recover.
Back in the day I took a history class that had as a reading assignment the reading of a book entitled "Nuclear War What's In It For You". I didn't read the book but took the test anywho. I ended up making the only 100 on the book exam in any of the history sections that made that assignment. Of course I was probably the only physics, and aerospace major in any of those sections.
The real hoot was that there was a question that ask what the temperature of of nuclear ignition was. I did not know, so I winged it by giving my answer in scientific notation, and Kelvins. My prof. marked it ok if you say so.
I've gotten a lot of laughs over the years from other physics types when I've told the story.
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year
STB
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them." --Marvin the Martian
Okay, well, you know how frequently you see an article written by someone who obviously didn't feel like working very hard for it. For example, a graduate student who comes to find out his term paper is due after spending his semester 'working' on it smoking pot on the beach, ergo he decides to write about a "Freeform Community Art Project" there, by which he means graffiti under a bridge.
By the same token I spent a semester playing World of Warcraft and wrote about how guilds fit the ideal type of a weberian bureaucracy. Apparently it was an A.
Assembly programming final, no less...
5 questions, 20 points each.
question number 4, I totally blanked on. I knew it. I knew I knew it, but I just couldn't remember what the answer was. I could picture what page it was in... even what paragraph, because I had highlited that specific passage as a possible question... and I blanked.
So I wrote about blanking during the test. My response was exactly what was going on in my head. What i was thinking. That I could remember knowing it, even where it was, but couldn't remember the actual answer. I could remember the paragraph before it, the paragraph after it, and even quoted the concepts in those paragraphs, but couldn't remember the answer to the specific question the professor was asking. I made it lighthearted, and honest.
And I got 10 out of 20 points. Just for sheer enjoyment of reading the answer, she said.
And a Merry Christmas to all! (No PC greetings here)
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
See i'm still recovering meant to say ...unsure as to...
I woke up at 8:02am for my 8am physics final... I have one of those 7-day alarm clocks and accidentally set the alarm for 7:30 Wednesday instead of 7:30 Tuesday. I had the lowest possible A in the class, another 1/10th of a percentage point would have given me a B, so I had to make at least a 180/200 on the final. I was pretty pissed off by the time I got there...
I ran into my TA two days later and asked him how I had done. After I gave him my name he frowned and said something like, "Oh.. I remember your exam... you missed alot of points," He pulled my paper out and showed it to me, "See, you missed a point here and a point here." I got a 99%.
I was really happy with my grade, considering how hopeless I am at rotational dynamics.
Perhaps I should share the story of the freshman bio (for majors) midterm I took while still drunk from partying the night before and got a B. Or the time when I completely forgot about the existance of blue books until I showed up to an English exam (to my defense, it had been some time since I took a final that wasn't multiple choice, due to being a hard science major).
But yeah, I haven't had many fun exploits.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
Story is probably BS, but I like it so much, I'll just pretend it is true.
My college roomate's dad was a math prof at either Penn state or U Penn or one of those. He would teach those enormous 800 student introductory courses. The final was always held in a theater. He would distribute the exams, then hoisting a pair of binoculars and a bullhorn, announce that he was headed up to the balcony and he would be watching everyone like a hawk. Most giggled at the suggestion that he could possibly proctor the exam from a distance, but he kept a serious demeanor.
Twenty minutes into the exam, he would lean over the railing and bellow out through the bullhorn: "You! Row 18, seat 34!! GET OUT!!!!" A stunned student would look guilty, drop his crib sheet, then run out of the room. The students were amazed at the prof's powers of perception and would abandon any thought of cheating.
The "cheater" was always a graduate student hired for the occasion. The prof swore by the method.
I don't have a really good story of a particular exam. But I do remember multiple exams where I finished very very early. Especially if the exam was multiple choice I would finish long before everyone else. I was sometimes wary of handing it in right away, thinking perhaps I missed a page or something, but no. I simply finished really quickly while other people were toiling.
I admit my grades weren't perfect, but I've got a degree and a job. Let that be a lesson to you kids still in school. You're probably putting in too much effort.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It sucked. I didn't really get it. I hated the prof, he was an idiot who didn't teach. Okay, it's quite possible that he wasn't an idiot, but he sure as heck couldn't teach. When I can't respect a teacher, I don't learn. So it's the final, and I've spend hours upon hours cramming for the test. I'm waiting with friends outside the room and the whole thing totally comes down on me. I'm smart but doing poorly in college, I'm 1000+ miles from home and I most don't want to admit defeat, or be convinced to go back home. At best I can get a B in the class, but I'm totally scared that I don't know enough to pass the final. I'd not gotten a B in a science class since 8th grade (and it's because I had no respect for the teacher then either). So, being a girl, start to cry. I hate the fact that it's so easy to be forced to tears, but there they are, dripping and slipping down my face. My friends (both guys) attempt to comfort me, and I manage to pull myself together and walk into the room dry-eyed.
Then the professor hands out the test.
Page 1, damn.
Page 2, shit.
Page 3, WTF? I hardly recognize anything!
Page 4, tears.
I sniff and snurffle my way through the exam. It's multiple choice, but the way they do the exams, if you don't answer the question you 0 points and if you answer it wrong you get negative points (so guessing is not going to work, even educated guesses are a risk), and the answers are all plausible (which is the most frustrating part.)
I finish, and dry my eyes long enough to turn the test in, the professor totally oblivoius.
A week later when they post the scores, I scroll to my ID, and I got 69%. SIXTY NINE PERCENT? I run to the top of the page to see the average (they grade on a bell curve). 31%. THIRTY ONE PERCENT??
Holy Mother of Physics, I friggin' doubled the AVERAGE? Only three people score higher. Sweet. (Of course, I probably didn't think "sweet" back then, it was over a decade ago.)
Oh, and I cheated on 4th grade spelling tests by sitting on the spelling book and looking at the words between my legs. I can't spell too well these days, so I suffer from that. And I told one person at the time, and somehow she managed to nearly fall out of her chair with the book while attempting to do the same thing. I stopped after that.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
Last exam for my last class of my last semester. Anthro course. Loved the material, the professor was a genius, so the test was easy. Brought in a nip of whiskey (mm bushmills) and had it sitting on my desk throughout the entire test. Took me about 20 minutes to finish. Drank the whiskey, handed in my test, walked out. This was not a large class, maybe 20 students in total, and I was in the front row. Not that great of a celebration, but I was done, done, done with my time in undergrad. At some point i've been told to go onto grad school for Ph. D. or masters, but I think that can wait for a few more years.
My neighbor showed me this back in 8th grade - he swore by this method. Take a wooden #2 pencil, and use a razor blade to slice it in half. Tape the two halves together on one side, so the pencil can be flipped open and closed. Write out whatever kind of crib sheet you need on mailing labels (in the smallest type you can). Then stick the label inside the pencil, and use the blade to trim off any excess label margins. Bring the pencil to your exam, and when the teacher isn't looking - flip it open to consult your notes. He claims he was never busted using this method...
I remember one time I actually studied and got an A. I was so totally shocked and wondered why I hadn't done that for the previous twenty years.
Good times.
Needless to say, I did not do well on the exam, and I didn't go to grad school either.
Okay, so I'm taking a test in an advanced physics class. This teacher _really_ has it out for me, and my so-called 'attitude.' I don't suck up to him, and I'm a bit of a smartass, and he's got a bit of a problem with that. Anyway, he told me in no uncertain terms that no matter how well I did on the test, I was gonna flunk. But I took it anyway, and found it a very easy test. I wrote, "I aced this!" on the test before I handed it in, and I also put an apple on his desk that was boobytrapped to explode slightly after a small jarring motion (I knew he'd just throw it in the trashcan after I left).
Oh, wait, that was a movie I saw.
Uhhh...nevermind, then.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One particular question was the atomic mass of a particular ion, something involving a few carbon atoms. I gave him the answer, minus about 6. Another question, another ion, I think it was a dichromate, which IIRC has 7 oxygen atoms. You get the wrong answer if you think it only has 4.
In the end, I got 95%, and he scored in the high 50's. I doubt he ever figured out that I had given him deliberately bad answers.
In the end, the coach pressured the teacher to pass him anyway, so he wouldn't lose his academic eligibility. I take great comfort in seeing him now on a Megan's List website for my home state, and his address is listed as "Incarcerated."
-paul
Pistol caliber is like religion: everyone has their favourite, and theirs is the only right choice.
Since the testing center keeps track of how long it took each student to take the test, he likes to laugh (hopefully not in the presence of his students) at how everyone who takes less than 20 minutes is always in the 0-30% range. Well, come finals time he noticed that he had a kid who got 98% (49/50) on the final in sixteen minutes. Amazing! ...wait... this student has been failing all semester. I guess they must have really crammed hard right? Nope. Look here, it's the kid's brother's score from the previous night: 1 hour 30 minutes, 49/50. Coincidence? Maybe...oh wait, they missed the exact same problem. Better luck next time cheaters.
Unfortunately my brother went soft on them and just threw the final out for both of them. The dumb kid failed as he should have, but the "smart" kid got an A or an A- (I don't recall). I say fail 'em both. At least the cheating will be on their record, and if caught again, they'll be kicked out.
><));>
I had a chemistry exam once. One of the question was sounding like "Why is some element behave this way while the rule tells that it sould behaves some other way like all the others". I didn't know the answer and was really fustrated after this &?%$?* element that I've never heard of.
So, rather angry, I answered: "to be able to ask questions that nobody can answer!"
The day after, my teacher came to see me personnally at my desk, with a big smile in her face, and told me that it was very rare to make a teacher laugh while making a chemistry exam correction.
Too bad though, I didn't get a better note for it.
Everybody is settling down for the last algebra test of the semester before the final when the woman in front of me turns around and asks why she missed a problem on the previous test:
-x^2 (x=2) => -4
She had answered a positive 4, and I told her it was an order of operations issue. I reminded her of the "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" stuff. I even showed her the expanded version of the problem: -1 * x^2. She completely freaked out, and nobody around her could calm her down.
Anyway, the test is handed out, and I notice that she is not working on it. A few minutes later, she reached into her backpack and pulled out a textbook for antother class. 10 minutes later, she walked out of the class, and did not return for the remainder of the semester, nor was she there for the final.
I once thought I'd take a short nap before a college final since I had studied for it and was tired. Woke up 15 minutes after the test started (oops, set the alarm clock for PM not AM) and ran across campus to room X. Got to room X and the test was for the right class, but wrong section. Turns out my test was in some other buildingbuilding, same room #. Flew back to my room to find the right building, then back across campus to furiously complete the test. Scored respectably, have had occasional nightmares ever since :>. I practically tattooed the finals location on myself for every subsequent final, and took NO naps prior to them.
Best story I have, I stood outside for around 15 minutes or so one time before I finally realized my final was already taking place inside.
But, I really like the story one of my professors told me. He had studied all night for one of his finals and was pretty much dead tired when he took it. But even though he was so tired, he's a pretty bright guy, so things were going along pretty well and right in the middle of the thing he decided to rest his eyes for a moment. Next thing he knows the professor is shaking him on his shoulder to wake him up and tell him the exam is over. Ouch.
Free will is just an illusion
This semester marks the first time that I've ever been exempted from taking the final exam for a course. The professor (for some reason) grades on either the mid-term or the final - odd in my experience, but I'm not complaining, since I aced the mid-term.
Might not be too exciting for some, but absolutely qualifies as a "best exam story" for me!
--- We are not in the 8th dimension. We are over New Jersey.
...if you're going to post something like that, it's only fair to link to a photo of yourself so we can judge how much of a distraction you would have been, had we been there.
Then again, once a tease, always a tease.
I arrive at the exam, sit down and once the professor says to start I take the exam out of the envelope and page through it planning my attack. There's maybe 8 pages, I'm looking over page 6 when the prof says "30 minutes, 30 minutes left."
I fell asleep - for 2.5 hours during a 3 hour exam.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
The high school AP Economics exam (like all AP exams) has two sections: multiple choice and short answer. Inbetween the sections we were allowed a half an hour break so we could eat and relax a bit. During this time in my adolesence I carried around a deck of card with me wherever I went, so I decided that now would be as good of a time as any to start a blackjack table in the middle of the concourse area. It was quite a hit among everyone there, and even my economics teacher got in on the fun. Nothing is quite as entertaining as a table of six high school kids getting revenge on their AP Economics teacher for making them take that stupid exam by kicking his ass in blackjack. Later on, during the short answer portion of the test, I had no clue regarding two of the questions, so I drew out a tic-tac-toe board and put an X in the middle and said "Mail me back with your move." and wrote my address next to it. Sadly, I never got a response. That would have been awesome.
This past semester I thought it would be a good idea to broaden my horizons and take a Canadian Military History course. While the course was very interesting, the prof was the one who had written the text book - and all answers contrary to his were wrong.
:-)
As such, when it came time for the final question "Were the Canadian bombing campaigns against Germany a demonstrably justified use of resources and lives" I immediately recalled his lecture. But, in my 8:00 a.m., Saturday morning, stupor, I decided not only to answer the question, but to provide a recommendation of what the Canadians should have done - invested in a Super Soldier program.
Yes, that's right, I told the prof that the Canadians should have created their own Captain America. I proceeded on for about 500 words to weigh the merits, benefits, and costs of developing the Canadian equivalent to Captain America (Captain Canuck was not what I recommended... stupid 70s trash).
Not only was I the second person to hand my final in, but I received an A for that answer.
I guess the prof loves the MarvelVerse just as much as I do
When I took SAT scores, way back in 1969, you paid for them in sets of three, and there were only 5 I wanted or needed to take. So I signed up for Math II, why not, if I was paying for six tests, I was damn well going to take six tests!
Skipped many questions going for the ones I knew. It was common knowledge that skipped questions did not coutn, only wrong answers. One I guessed at, and remembered it well enough to ask my math teacher. He showed me and I had guessed wrong.
But when the scores came in, I got 800 (perfect; SAT scores range from 200 to 800) on Math II. Not on Math I, and not on any of the other 4 tests, only on Math II. I told the counselor it was wrong. He called me back a few days later, they claimed they had hand scored it, and yes I got 800.
Haven't had much faith in big automated tests since.
Infuriate left and right
Hey, it worked.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
For one particularly dumb class the professor gave us all, ~300, a packet of multiple choice questions, ~100, from which the test questions will be taken. I had no interest in this class and so did not even look at the booklet. However, my friend had completed every question and highlited the answers in yellow. Ten minutes before the test I quickly read the questions and memorized the overall position of the yellow line. I took very little time to finish the test and recieved a B without actually learning/reading the answers to the test.
Turns out I really did have a better handle on the material than anyone else. I got the high score...
When it came time for the final, I went in with a felt-tip pen (not pencil), was the first finished, and aced the f@#cker, 100%. I did not have to cross out a single thing, I just did all 8 pages of it straight through. I did not miss a single point on any of my equations, drawings, answers, nada! It is one of the few shining moments in my academic career. Whenever someone brings up that I took Calc III three times (I dropped it twice), I recite this story.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
I was taking a fairly easy class in Shakespeare to fill in the good ol' humanities requirement several years ago. Well a friend and I were done with all of our finals except this one. Summer was around the corner and we wanted this two hour exam to fly by... so, naturally, we decided to bring beer. After having a couple of beers as a primer, we filled 2 of those huge 64 oz. coffee mugs, that were SO trendy back then, with Henry Weinhard's and off we went to our 10 am final. I'm fairly certain our good mood was a dead give away, but the professor didn't say anything. Anyway, it made the whole experience much more pleasant. IMHO, being somewhat drunk might actually be a plus for an essay type exam. It loosens your tongue so that you can write what you are really thinking. Needless to say, I got an 87 and have been telling this story proudly ever since.
The final and the homework were equivalent points- and I only needed 29 more points for an A, out of 100 multiple guess questions scored on a scantron machine. So I did the ultimate nerdy thing- brought in a ruler with my #2 pencil, answered the first 29 questions very carefully, then took a ruler and marked "C" for the rest. Final score was 73%.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Best Semetester
At least once during every semester, I would suggest that we adjourn class and re-convene at a local drinking establishment. No one has ever to take me up on the suggestion. However, once after a final, some of the students were going to said drinking establishment to celebrate. We invited the Prof, and he accepted and came along for a few beverages.
Worst Semester
Finals during my freshman year. During finals week, a few of us guys drove from Kansas to Iowa for a party that some girl invited us to (Geeks will go to great lenthgs for women). Broke down in Elk Horn Iowa looking for gas. Whilest waiting for the local gas station to open we engaged in some nefarious activities. We ended up drink Moose Head beer in Elk Horn Iowa. After gassing up, we went on to the party. Next day we drive back. This is the semester I ended up with a 0.700 GPA. I flunked 10 out of 16 hours, but damn did I have fun.
Using the Freedom of Speech while I still have it.
The night before his English Lit class, one of the morons on our dorm floor had to cram all night long since he hadn't done any of the reading or assignments for the class all semester long. I don't know how many of those No-Doze caffeine/uppers pills he took. All I know is that he had overdosed so badly that his hands wouldn't stop shaking. He found it quite difficult to write essays in the blue book with his hands spasming the entire time.
Remeber kids, use drugs with care. They aren't candy.
GMD
watch this
Not an exam perse, but still funny.
Back in my junior year in High School, I was out sick for a week. During that week the teacher had mentioned a test: we'd have to read a play (I think any American-written play) and we'd be given a test on it. Well, this message didn't get back to me and we didn't discuss it during the few days I was back from my sick leave.
A few minutes before class I see EVERYONE reading a different paperback book and I realize something's off. I ask around, and I find out a test is today. Uh-oh.
Just as we were about to walk in a friend of mine said the teacher allowed him to use the screen play for Twister. I figure I might as well use that since I saw it in the theater a few weeks ago.
I get the test and answer the long essay questions, character questions, etc. I spend more time on the Romance and friendship angle than the flying cows and such.
A week goes by and we get the results. I get a B while my friend got a C-. He told her in front of everyone that was "BS! He didn't even know about the test until just before class and such. She said I answered everything thoroughly and was apparently a good BS artist.
All-in-all, I'd say I lucked out pretty well.
If you're going to fail anyway, decide to do so beforehand. It saves you all that worry.
When it came to revision time, me and my best mate at uni had a choice. We could spend 4 weeks straight learning crystal structures and other shit for Materials, and we might scrape 50% in that one exam. Or we could spend that time revising everything else, and pass overall. Simple decision really. So come exam day, it was in there, names on papers, wait the required 15 minutes, walk out again, enjoy the sunshine.
As for horror stories, the whole course was shit. If anyone went to Loughborough University to do Elec Eng, do they have a decent course these days? cos when I was there 8 years back, if you weren't there to study power electronics then you were wasting your time. Of course, this didn't become apparent until you got to the 3rd year and found that there were precisely 3 modules related to embedded software and systems (for reference, a Masters course requires 10 modules). Oh, and a compulsory course in Materials (WTF?) was a double-weighting course at at time when you're choosing your options - great for anyone doing transistor design, but crap for everyone else.
That year, I'd had enough. I finally cracked, and went and told the head of my department that this course was doing nothing for me. I told him that I'd specifically come to uni to get the knowledge I'd need to work in embedded software and embedded control, and the course was failing to do this. And this guy's answer? "We will teach you what we think you should know, not what will be useful to you." Word for word from the head of an engineering department, I shit you not.
The moral of the story? Before you apply for a course, insist on getting the lists of final-year module options *before* you go there. It'll save lots of grief later.
Grab.
I showed up five minutes late to a psychology final in university. Seven minutes later, I had completed the exam (I was the first person in the class of about four hundred to do so). The exam was multiple choice. So I handed it in. I didn't do wonderfully in the class but I certainly did well above average.
Another time, I was trying to get my friends to buy me alcohol before writing a programming final. I promised to drink all they'd buy me, then go write the exam. I picked my friends well, though, and nobody took me up on the offer. I ended up with the highest grade in the class and probably would have got an 8 instead of a 9 had I written the exam while drunk.
In one of my math classes, I totally forgot how to do matrix math. Gone, out of my head as soon as I sat down. Every question involved matrix math so I ended up having to solve every freakin' question long hand. Luckily, no points were given for HOW you answered the question, though you did have to show your work. I ended up getting one of the highest marks for the class, pulling my grade well above the possible fail I was half expecting.
One other time, I was half an hour in to the exam and all I had was my name on top of each of the answer pages. I couldn't get a single question. [sigh]
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Or the time when I completely forgot about the existance of blue books until I showed up to an English exam (to my defense, it had been some time since I took a final that wasn't multiple choice, due to being a hard science major).
"Hard science"? If your tests were multiple choice, I doubt the classes you were taking could be considered "hard science".
UIUC, Champaign, December, 1990, Physics III (Quantum Theory, etc.) 3 hour final. Crammed all night for test, a bit shaky on the concepts. 8AM final at Loomis (I think that is the name) Physics lecture Hall. Arrived, started the final, which is designed to take all 3 hours. All multiple-choice, with those funky machine readable exam sheets. 15 minutes in, started feeling VERY poorly. As it is Winter, I'm coming down with something. I soon determine I am going down for the count. Cannot concentrate on exam, so start filling in ovals with words made up of A,B,C,D,E. "Finished" the exam at 8:30AM, Walked all the way down to the front (I had sat in the nosebleed section, and the lecture hall is VERY steep, you know what I mean) and handed in the exam, smiled at the TA, turned around and looked up to see LOTS of students looking at me with amazement, jealousy, or outright anger. Walked up to exits, drug myself back to Allen Hall, crashed and slept for the next 16 hours. Received a 'C' on the exam, and an 'A' for the class, if I recall.
I always wanted to hand in an exam incredibly early, but am not THAT intelligent. Still, all my friends in the class were AMAZED I was able to tackle Quantum Theory in 30 minutes, at least until I told them the complete story.
Jim
Posting as AC since I don't know who might read this.
Before one particular mid-term, I needed to stay up all night studying. Figured I'd take 1/4 tab of acid to keep me alert and wired. It worked, but exam time came around, and my head was still swimming.
That was the most fun I'd during an exam, and the kicker was - I only scored 1 percentage point lower than my buddy who was quite envious.
The University that I attended, offered a simple VB class for non-CS majors intended to teach students simple progammings skills. Most of those who where enrolled were in the Aviation program. As a Senior CS major, I took the class for an easy A. I showed up on the first day of class to get the syllabus and turned homework and extra credit in via email. The only other two times I showed was for the mid-term and final. (both were a breeze, in and out in less then 20 minutes for a 2 hour test). Ended up with a 112% (extra credit added in). So much for the curve....
So I took a course back in the day that was meant as a way of convincing promising students to pursue a career in Chemistry. Instead of the usual boring intro to Chem class, this one had us performing MRIs on unknown chemicals, learning the basics of quantum theory... the works. Very, very interesting. And incidentally, bizarrely difficult.
;-)
So, around comes finals time. We file in, grab our little blue books and about 40 pages of exam, and we're off and running. The first half of the test is your standard questions covering concepts and material from the class. I'm doing ok, feeling pretty good about myself. Furious scribbling is going on around me as we all work through the exam.
Next comes the second half of the exam. In this section (the page explains), a newly discovered chemical will be presented, and we're expected to use our knowledge of chemistry to figure out how it behaves, etc. This sounds very tricky. With some trepidation, I turn the page to discover what this molecule is.
And break up laughing. Snorting, really. People turn to look at me, wondering if I'm cracking under the pressure. I laugh some more to myself, fill out the rest of the exam book in record time, and head out whistling, the first student to do so, 45 minutes before the end of the exam.
Why did I laugh, you wonder? A little back story is in order. For three summers before going off to college, I had been working as a research assistant at what was then Bell Labs, working in organic chemistry. The molecule we were given to explain was none other than Buckminsterfullerene, the subject of my lab's study.
What would you expect it to look like in solution? Well, a nice deep purple is how I remember it.
How would you go about separating it out of the carbon soot it forms in? Here, let me draw you a diagram of our extraction system...
How do you think it would behave when doped with alkali metals? How about I quote from the paper I coauthored?
Luckiest damn thing that has ever happened to me. I felt a little guilty of course, but not so much that I made a big deal about it. It's not my fault that when I cited my research by name, the grader assumed it was my dad.
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
During my freshman year at RIT, I lived in a rather tiny dorm room. I kept my alarm clock on my bed, and one morning, the morning of a big CS exam, it got lodged between my bed and the wall, in such a manner that the snooze button was held down. I woke up about a minute into the exam, threw on some clothes, and hopped on a shuttle bus that was right outside my dorm. I got into the 1-hour test about 15 minutes late and was still the first one done. (I got a grade in the high 90's.)
(That was also the same class where the professor once checked his e-mail on the projector and a message with a From: line of SuicideGirls.com was visible.)
1) In a highschool physics course we were writing a test and my freind behind him was comparing answers (which would be cheating) with mine and then get to one question and hear my freind behind me wisper "You might wanna double check q3", and sure enough I had it wrong so I fixed it and saved myself the mark or two.
2) In this same class we had another test, and all the people who had a hope of passing finished halfway though, so we started talking to each other and then started playing pictionary with the teacher. Meanwhile the others in the class were trying to cheat off eachother but they didn't know the answers so it didn't help any of them.
3) In one of my first year calc courses, I thought I had done poorly on the midterm and was pissed off at this one proof question because I couldn't get the right answer but couldn't figure out my mistake. Then we got the marks and I noticed I did a lot better than expected and saw a question with marks 15/10, so i thought there was a mistake with marking, but someone pointed out I was probably the one person the prof said got the answer out of 300, because the question turned out to be incorrect. So I got bonus marks for proving the question wrong.
The professors there relished their difficult exams. Every exam was scheduled to take 2 hours. But they would let us all stay and keep working on the exams well after the time period was up. I remember one micro-economics exam that took 7 hours. Seven hours!
During that exam, I noticed that the two Lithuanians kept getting up to go to the bathroom. Turned out they were writing answers on the stall walls and trading them.
Meanwhile, a Chinese student in the back corner kept fiddling with her paper. Va Tech is on the Honor System, so the prof kept leaving the room, and wasn't there for large chunks of time. Someone finally complained to him about the Chinese girl, and sure enough, she had all of her notes from the semester out, and claimed she was using the back of them for scratch paper.
So the prof took them to make an Honor Court case.
Later that night, Chinese girl and her buddy sneak into the prof's office and take the evidence !
I found out about this later because I was sitting on the Honor Court, and as I started hearing about the case, a bell went off in my head. "Umm, is this about the graduate Econ department?"
Honor Court: "Why, yes it is. How did you know?"
Me: "Because I am in that department. I'd heard rumors. I know these people."
Honor Court: "Oh, well then you should leave. Sorry!"
I always find it amusing that the Chinese girl transferred to the Marketing department, where I guess they don't care so much about cheating.
Our instructor arived nearly 2 hours late to the final, stinking of alcohol, and turned it into a takehome with a week to work on it. Not that it would have been at all difficult to do in two hours in class though. It's now long ago enough that I can't get in trouble, so... though I'm not proud of it, I also wrote entirely seperate answers to the final for my then-girlfriend, something I'd never have been able to do if the instructor had been watching.
yeah, she plagerized her way through school.
I think now she's an aeronautical engineer... which makes me afraid to fly on new planes.
More recently, and quite embarasingly, I left some big problems on a LISP exam "for later", got really engrosed in the last (and biggest) problem on the exam, and after finishing that, forgot to go back and do the other, I lost 15% or so for that (doh!)
Less look fast, more go fast.
AP English test with an essay question: discuss the author's use of and attitude towards violence in any one of several novels.
I had taken AP English, but had hated all of the recommended reading (Hemingway, the Great Gatsby, etc.) So I was unfamiliar with all the novels on the test list, except one...the Invisible Man.
Hey, I thought to myself, I read that one a few years ago, by H.G. Wells. So I wrote this long essay about the dude who drank this potion, became invisible, then snuck around for a while until he started getting mentally unstable and beating up on people.
I was proud of the essay -- a fine piece of work, if I do say so myself. Then after the test, I found out they weren't talking about The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells...they meant The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a book about the African-American experience in post-Civil-War America.
I passed the test (barely) with a 3/5. The essay question was worth 1 all by itself, so I'm sure it scored a zero.
Somewhere, some English professor had a good chuckle grading my test...
I've been pretty succesful academically (highest honors etc.), and the one thing which has remained constant for me is one part of my test taking strategy. It's quite simple, never, ever walk into the exam on time. Always get there 5 minutes late when everyone is calm and quiet.
So I decided to take the GRE's and see about grad school, to try to keep my grey matter nimble. I read one of those guides, it seemed straight-forward, so I signed up.
I had to drive out to Sheridan, WY to take the test, since they weren't offering one in SD anytime soon. I drove out the night before, found a hotel, and drove around looking for a place to have a nice leisurely dinner, maybe a glass of wine, relax, and then get a good night's sleep.
I saw the "Beaver Creek Saloon", clearly an upstanding establishment, judging by the very shiny signs and exterior. I walked up, pulled open the door, and saw: A bar, not a restaurant. (Ok, the name saloon should have clued me in). It was full of bikers and hippies, all having a good time, and staring at the door to see who the hell was coming in.
Not a tourist joint. Very much a local joint.
So, doing what I had to, I walked in. Ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon. ("Heinekin? F&^k that sh*t! Pabst Blue Ribbon, boy!")
Many adventures ensued, including my first pickled egg, a tiger tattoo on a woman named Cheyenne, a near brawl at a nearby cowboy bar, and other tales unrelated to the test.
Needless to say, I had no dinner, no glass of wine. But I did have a lot of beer, and then made it back to the hotel.
I got up the next day, hit a Perkins where I consumed a pitcher of coffee, a pitcher of orange juice, 6 egg yolks, and a piece of toast.
I shakily walked into the test, sat down, and blasted through it. I figured I did all right.
My test scores came back: I'd aced the quantitative and analytical sections, and nearly aced the verbal. 99th percentile. Holy crap!
So I went to Kaplan and taught GRE classes for awhile.
I'm pretty sure standardized exams are a load of crap.
The general format was four sections: I believe one was verbal, one mathematical, and one analytical, plus an "extra" fourth secection which was just another verbal or mathematical or analytical section--I got analytical as the fourth section.
I don't know which of the two analytical sections actually "counted" toward my final score. One section was quite hard, and the second was amazingly easy, so the answer may be obvious, but I don't know for sure. My resulting score on the analytical section was very, very high, but I still have no way of knowing for sure which section was counted.
So, unfortunately no antics here other than to have rejoiced with a much higher-than-expected score!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
In high school, we had an assignment to do a 3-page paper about some Shakespeare story. I forget which one, but it involved some characters overhearing part of a conversation and getting the wrong idea. (It goes without saying that I didn't read the book/play/story/whatever.) I wrote a 2 and 1/3-page paper based mostly on what the teacher said in class* and made comparisons to the sitcom "3's Company" which often relied on the partially-overheard-conversation as a plot device.
Not only did that paper garner an honest-to-God "A+" but the teacher photocopied it, handed it out to the class, and spent a period discussing it as an example of how to write a good paper.
* I think I also used Cliff Notes. You know those? You know how they also have an extra-extra short (3-4 page) summary in the beginning? I think I skimmed that. God am I lazy.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
In a Spanish class in HS, my teacher suspected that a student sitting next to me was cheating, so he asked me if I would intentionally answer several questions incorrectly in a pre-determined way. I did so, and when he compared my answers with the guy sitting next to me, it was obvious that he cheated....and these were fill-in answers, not multiple-choice, so the cheating wasvery, vey obvious.
The guy threatened to kick my butt after class, but we worked it out and eventually became friends!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I had a programming languages final at 8:00AM, a class I had been doing reasonably well in, though not stellar (professor always gave Y points worth of questions, but only ever expected anyone to do Y/2 worth of work, great for choice, all hard problems).
The night before, a nice young lady was staying over, and we were occupied until around 3AM. I went to sleep but forgot to set the alarm...
8:15AM rolled around, I check the clock, leap up, put on rollerblades, skate across campus to class, and get there at 8:30 to chuckles from everyone (including my next door neighbor). I finished by 9:45, completing 3Y/4 worth of work, getting 5Y/8 points correct. I got an A in the course.
Not a bad way to finish a semester.
After a night of smoking pot instead of sleeping I arrived at school to learn that I had to do a presentation. :), my near perfect english pronounciation (this one still amazes me the most) and for being so completly relaxed...
The presentation would start within the hour and had to be in english (I'm Dutch). To add to the misery they brought in a Real English Lady(tm) to evaluate our language skills.
The only good news was that I had to talk about "The history of the Internet".
I spent my last minutes with Google, looking up dates and names before I had to start, still as stoned as an elephant.
I did talk, amazing myself about the number of odd little facts I knew about the Internet, and received perfect marks. I was complimented for my excellent preperation, the great structure of my presentation (chronological
High school physics taught by a phys ed teacher. We were doing vectors and the examples leading up to the exam were things like "Plane goes 300mph max, 50mph headwind, what's the groundspeed". Teacher made up his own question for the exam -- something like "dude can bike 30kph max, how fast does he go into a 5kph wind" I knew he wanted 25, but that is clearly not the true answer so I said "something less than 30 but greater than 25" with a brief explaination of drag. He marked me wrong and 15 years later I still haven't forgiven the ignorant fuck.
I came down with a serious case of flu just before my last final exam before the Christmas break. I was doing major projectile vomiting and feeling terrible. Later in the day, I dragged myself down to the student health center and got a note from the doctor there who vouched that I was too sick to write the exam.
A went to the Professor's office a couple of days later when I was feeling better to explain the situation and ask about a re-sit. It was a small class and he noticed that I wasn't there for the exam. It was a half-term course, and University policy was that resits could only be conducted at the end of full-year term, which would have been in April.
The Professor did not think it was fair that I would have to write an exam for a course that was over four months ago, and he didn't want to go to the trouble of making up a new set of exam questions for just one student. Since the final exam only counted for 15% of the total grade and I already had an A-, the Professor suggested that if I just showed up and handed in a blank exam book, he would give me an A- as my final grade for the course.
I was more than pleased to agree.
The re-sit was scheduled for the last day of final exams in April. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to combine final exams and intoxication. I drank a lot of beer and headed off to the exam. The only shortfall in my strategy is that they will not let people leave the examination room until 45 minutes after the exam began. I was doing OK at the beginning, but the 45 minute interval could not arrive soon enough for my liking. Fortunately, I made it to the men's room in the nick of time. I made a mental note to stick with liquor if a similar opportunity ever presented itself again.
It didn't, but I can honestly claim that I wrote a final exam totally drunk, and still got an A.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
It was a EE course, programming microprocessors or something like that. The final is at 5pm. The room starts filling up at 4:30, and all of us are early, because the prof (an East Asian) has a terribly thick accent and nobody wants to be rushed setting up. So 5 rolls around and no prof. 5:05, 5:10, 5:15 and still no prof. AT 5:30 the TA's (all South Asians) tell us that if we decide to leave, sign up on a sheet they have so that th soe who leave can be contacted. AT 5:45 the prof storms in, swearing, and pulls the TAs into a side room. We hear yelling in badly-accented English on all parts. Finally, everyone comes out and the TAs tell us to check with the EE Dean tomorrow. SAeesm that the prof thnks he told the TAs to pick up the exam and hand it out. The TAs think that they were only told to show up and proctor.
So the next day everyone is at the Dean's office, and he announced that the exam was rescheduled for Friday. Now, this was the last day of exam week, and quite a few people were already palnning to leave Thursday. SO we all complain about this, and so the Dean compromises - we see the deptartment secretary and she'll tell us each our current grade. If we are happy with it, we get that on the final, and that's our grade. If we don't like it, we stay till Friday.
Needless to say, with a middling B, I took my grade and ran.
I've chosen the bad door when going to my first year final exam of english language... ;)
I found the exam pretty difficult and couldn't answer some of the questions. Somehow, i noticed that I didn't know any of the people passing the exam with me but it didn't ring an alarm. When i gave my exam papers to the professor who was supervising us, he couldn't find me in the list... he asked my who my teacher was for this dicipline, and said:
Wait... $professor doesn't teach to 4th grade students !
Me: 4th grade ? I'm in first grade !
Supervisor: (starts laughing a lot... ) Well you must have found the exam pretty difficult, this is the 4th grade exam....
Me: do'h...
He then proceeded to correct my paper just for the fun of it... and it wasn't that bad after all
I had a physics prof who put underscores spaced out for people to neatly print their names on the test form. You know like _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ . I have a long hyphenated last name, 10 letters hyphen 11 letters. After the first exam he noticed my name didn't fit the lines. From then on all exams had a last name slot that was _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ - _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
I recently did a mock for a GCSE IT exam. The entire paper was scheduled for one hour. I finished it in about 15 minutes. The whole thing consisted of multiple choice questions along the lines of, "Which of these is an input device? (Printer, Internet, Keyboard, Plotter)". It was quite disturbing.
On the mid term day, I looked down at the exact same exam. Standard distribution of scores, even with the answers read out in class my teaching didn't much impact test scores.
In my Chemistry mid-term one student came in about 10-15 minutes. After sitting down he took one look at the test, signed his name to it, handed it in, and then walked out! To this day none of us can figure out why he even showed up.
;-) In the same class I stopped studying for the tests (except the listening portion) and my test scores actually went up! Meanwhile, one of the baseball players and some hot girl hitting on him were flunking the class. It's beyond my comprehension how that was even possible! I mean, I would have to conciously decided to flunk!!
In Music Appreciation several of the multiple choice answers were Star Trek references. Hmm, was it Patrick Stewart or Bach who walked over 200 miles to Lübeck?
-- Argel
I used to publish my lecture notes prior to a test and encouraged my students to read them. One time, in the middle of those notes, I put in a comment like this:
"For those of you willing to take the time to read these notes, I'm giving extra credit. I'm going to put a question on the test that reads 'What is the answer to the secret question?', to which you'll reply 'xyzzy'. Please don't tell anyone else in class about this, because you'll be giving them free credit when they don't deserve it."
I handed out the tests and sat back to watch. It was really interesting. The students who I knew would read the notes just smiled, while the students I knew who wouldn't have read my lecture notes just scratched their heads. It was quite an enjoyable experience for me, and taught a lesson to all.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
I showed up for a CS exam feeling like crap, hadn't studied (I never did though), wasn't really in the mood. Well, the test was pretty hard but I was doing ok. I figured I had enough points in the rest of the class to maintain a good final grade at the end of the semester. So the guy next to me starts erasing page after page. I'm in shock that he would do something like this, and am just staring at him, watching the whole spectacle.
:-)
The prof sees and calls me up to the front of the room. He tried to kick me out of the class, and threatened to turn me into the administration. I explained what was going on (being as sick as I was) with the erasure. He let me off, thankfully
I ended up getting a B, and the guy who did all the erasing ended up really pissed off that he changed his answers.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
This past semester, I was exhausted after midterm papers and afraid I'd sleep through my alarm, so I asked my mom to call and wake me up before my Ancient Western Philosophy midterm exam. I woke up half an hour before the exam wondering why she hadn't called, and I discovered I had two voicemails from her and five from my dad. Apparently my phone had not rung for any of their calls, and my dad's messages to me were him cussing and screaming at me for "deciding to sleep through my exam". I crushed the exam in 20 minutes and made an A- and decided never to have my parents act as my alarm clock again.
"of all worlds, may the good lord deliver us from a world where everyone
One time I took earth science as a gen ed course in college. I showed up an hour and a half late to the final because I overslept. The professor chewed me out but relented and let me take it. I finished it in 10 minutes and got an A.
Ok, so this fall semester that just ended, I was taking a course in MPI Programming. It happened that it was my 4th consecutive class with the same instructor, who I'd gotten to know fairly well by then. And because the HPC program at this school is lightly attended, and I was taking a night class, I was the only student in the class. Anway, the "final exam" was set to be a programming assignment, which was to be of my choosing.
But the next to last night of class, the instructor asks me what I still have left to turn in, and I tell him "the last homework project and the final exam." He tells me to forget about the final exam and that he'll just use that last homework as the "final exam" grade; and that he's so impressed with what I've already turned in - and what he knows about me from the other classes - that he's already decided I get an 'A' in the class.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I sat a physics exam when these fancy types of calculators were quite new.
We were allowed to use them as long as we showed the exam supervisors that we cleared the memory first.
I loaded it with notes and programmed one of the menu buttons to display the message "Memory Clear" so I could *ahem* "clear" it in front of one of the exam supervisors.
Then I had an attack of conscience and cleared it for real before I actually used any of the stored notes.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Jordan is the best movie character ever.
Now-a-days I justify this to myself saying that the kind of class (or professor) that requires this kind of thing (learning by rote memorization) is stupid anyway, and nothing good can come from craming to memorize something you'll forget 10 minutes after the exam.
I never memorised physics or calculus formulae - I derived the formula needed for each question from first principles when I reached a question needing that particular formula.
I owe this ability to a great high school physics teacher, Tom Leys (now deceased, what a loss!) of St Bede's College, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Whenever he introduced a new concept we would learn the principles first, and then the formula.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
I actually saw one of the panic, faint and vomit scenarios in a differential equations final once. About 5 minutes into the test Dave (his real name) just fell out of his desk out cold and started vomiting. Prof told everybody to just sit and he call the ambulance and they wheeled poor Dave off. About 30 minutes after the test I ran into Dave on campus. They had a goood laught and released him from the hostpital (on campus variaty). He ended up taking the test the next day.
C++ Final. The bulk of the grade was actually the programming. The final was only worth 20% of the grade, but failing the final was an automatic failure of the class (threat, prof actually handed out incompletes). Anyway, we're allowed one page of notes for the test. I decide to type the code listing of the last program of the text since it used every aspect of C++ covered in the textbook.
The final exam is the exact program and several pages of questions about it. I finished in record time with a perfect score. I even corrected unintentional typos on the exam. Unfortunately, I think I've used my lifetime store of luck for that one test.
A friend of mine had a physics exam in college and the prof told the class that anything they could fit on a 8.5x11 sheet of paper could be used on the test. Come test day everyone had their "cheat sheets" out on their desk. My friend came into class with a physics phd he knew, put the piece of paper down next to his desk and had the phd stand on it. He aced the test.
-Tolerate my intolerance
I just don't learn either.
I've done (and yes, it's become a sport for me):
- Correcting teachers after a few weeks just after I started with their course, and being very right (about basic truths where they were stone cold lying). Done this in maths (when I was 13), physics (17), information analysis (18) and probably a few others.
- Just being an arse and getting an A without learning. Stopped counting.
- Being the only one to finish a course, and not learning.
- Having to apologize to friends that they failed a course because I got an A and they couldn't adjust the grades up because of that.
- Complaining about my A+ not being raised higher even though the regulations clearly say you can't get better than that.
- Not learning (actually, I never learn), intentionally oversleeping 59 minutes on a final exam (chemistry), finishing first (including the rest which was busy for a full hour) and STILL having the best grade (just an A, mixed up one bit).
- Skipping an exam because there was a good movie showing in theatre and making the retry only instead.
- In an oral test, plain claim to the teacher that since you know more about a certain area some thing he is asking you is plain obsolete and thus not worth explaining, and finishing it with a B+.
Back when I was studing for a Linear Algebra exam in Junior College I programmed all of the possible equations in my TI-185. The language was essentially a limited form of Basic and I was sooo arrogant and confident in my amateur programming I changed all of my answers in the final exam to match my calculators answers. I was so sure at the time, the calculator was right.
:-)
Well it was almost ALL WRONG.
Surely, I must have programmed it wrong because I ended up failing big time but I managed to pass the course by the skin of my teeth!
I always wondered what my real mark would have been if I haven't use my calculator in the exam. I still have my TI-185 with me today, along with those original programs. Someday I'll debug and find out why but who cares I passed the f... course!
"If a show of teeth is not enough, bite
The TA handed out the exam, seeing it for the first time along with the twenty of us. Not one single question was anything close to what we had studied. It seemed as if the entire test was composed of weird special cases of the concepts we were learning(i.e. if you didn't know the "trick," it was going to take forever!)
After five minutes the TA got up and said "You guys probably forgot this by now" and wrote a formula up on the board. Then another. Then another. I'll never for get this part: He got up and announced:
and then he left.We all sort of looked at each other and then started to talk over the questions. Don't remember what I got, but we handed our tests to him at midnight...at the coffee shop.
I'm pretty sure that the TA, who was a really nice guy--excited about math and all--felt bad for not preparing us for the asshole professor's final exam. We all thanked him.
I don't think anybody got an A, though.
It could have happened...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Back in the yesteryear of 1995 I was attending UCSB. My roomate decided to pull one of the best final exam pranks I have yet to hear about. He scoped out a good sized class with enough students (~300) to ensure that the professor would not recognize him...especially since he wasn't enrolled in the class. He also wanted to make sure that the test was nice and long. 3 hours should do. He shows up to the final exam. Takes his seat. Receives the exam. Promptly gets to answering the questions, quite diligently, regardless of the fact he knows nothing of the subject matter. He continues to get thoroughly involved in the test. Biting his pencil. Scratching his head. Huffing when needed. Half an hour of this goes by, and then he administers his coup de grace. He reaches an apex of huffing and pencil biting, stands up, yells at the top of his lungs, "I CAN'T TAKE THIS ANYMORE!", grabs his exam, rips it up into shreds, scatters it onto the heads of his "fellow" students and promptly storms out of the lecture hall.
this one time, at band camp, i.....
and i finished first too.
This was my final exam, by which I mean it was my last year of university, and the last scheduled exam of the year. Like most people in my position, I had done the math beforehand. To graduate, I needed a bunch of required and optional courses. I had them. I needed an overall average of greater than 60, and my average was high enough that this wasn't a problem: even with 0 in this course, my overall would be fine. Besides, in this course, the exam only counted for 1/4 of the final mark, and I had done well enough on the assignments that even if I got a 0 on the final exam, I'd get a mark in the 60s for the course. I needed no more than 3 failures, and I had 3 (a really bad couple of terms before I learned that I should study sometimes). It sounded idiot-proof, except for one hazard: not writing the exam gets you an "incomplete" in the course, which is a failure. All I needed to do in order to graduate was show up, write my name on the exam paper, and turn it in.
Of course, by now you know where this is going. On my way to school for the afternoon exam session, I met my roommate coming back. He wondered where I was this morning. I told him I was studying, even though I didn't really need to. He told me the exam was this morning. I thought he was kidding me. He wasn't. My date-book had the exam written down in the afternoon, but when I looked though course notes, I found the handout announcing the exam in the morning session. To this day I have no idea why I wrote it down in the wrong timeslot.
I didn't quite panic, but I was close. I continued to school, found the professor, and explained my stupidity. Almost, but not quite hysterical, I begged to at least give me a zero on the exam, instead of a "did not write".
He found a couple of empty grad student offices for me and the other guy who made the same mistake, and let us both write it. I didn't quite ace it, but I did do reasonably well, passed the course, graduated, got a good paying job and a successful life.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
The best story I have to tell about final exams is the time one of my computer science professors was on his way to give the final exam and a car struck him! He was not injured badly but the incident caused him to be late for the exam and as such he had to shorten it. Ha!
On the way to a final three hour exam I was waiting for the guy who used to give me a lift to the campus which was about a 20 minute drive away. He didn't show up. This was before mobile phones were common so I had no way of contacting him. I didn't know his number anyway.
Turns out that his car had broken down, and another guy on the course picked him up, but they forgot to pick me up.
Unfortunately although it was only a 20 minute drive, it was over an hour on the two buses that had to be taken to get there - I got into the exam just over an hour late, finished it in 35 minutes then walked out and went home.
Was asked if I was ok and was I having problems to which I replied that I'd simply finished, which got me some disbelieving stares.
Passed it naturally.
Something very similar to what you describe was in the movie Slackers, which is rather funny and also features a couple hot chicks.
I took an English class back in my freshman year at Northeastern, and a friend of mine was in the class with me. I was a Poli Sci major, my friend was an accounting major, so the class was a little easier for me, and she and I would study together. For the midterm, we were supposed to read and analyze the Dorothy Parker novella "Big Blonde".
Well, I basically blew it off. My friend, on the other hand, worked very hard on it, spend several days with the story, and wrote the analysis exactly as requested. Finally, the day before the paper was due, I got around to reading it (i read very fast):
I thought it sucked. Excruciatingly so. So, faced with a dilemma, I simply wrote a scathing report that opened with the sentence: "Early on in Big Blonde, Dorothy Parker's protagonist contemplates suicide. Had she only gone through with it, I would have been spared the agony of reading the rest of this hideous excuse for a story".
I went on like that for several pages. It seemed right. My friend looked at the paper with horror before I handed it in, but I felt good about it.
A few days later, they were handed back. My friend got a B-, if I recall. I didn't get a grade. Just a request to meet with the professor. When I did, after class, she simply said to me "this wasn't what I asked for - why did you write it?". At which point I spent about 15 minutes explaining and defending my criticism.
I got an A. And I think that was one of the only classes I aced that year, too.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
It wasn't a final, but I walked into class one morning and one of my classmates asked, "So are you ready for the exam?" "Uhh...what exam?"
I scored my first and only 100 on any exam in college.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
There were these two freaks, one grad student and one freshman, who ended up rooming together at the entrance to my lair. I swear one of them was just like that! Big attitude, never took anything seriously, he spent a lot of time trying to convince women that he had a brain and a penis. The other one was a nice kid, kinda dorky but then who am I to talk? He ends up hooking up with this hyper girl down the hall, and the two of them.. well, let's say I had to turn my server fans up all the way to cover up the noise. All week!
Driving test question: What do you do when you come up to a yellow light?
whispered reply: slow down
What....do...you...do...when...you...come...up.. .to...a...yellow...light?
slow down!
What............do...........you............do.. ..........when.........you............come........ .......up
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
On the exam, the professor had put a bonus question, stated simply "Write a single syntactically correct assembler command." The kid sitting next to me had finished fairly early, and I noticed he was spending a lot of time on the bonus question. He gets up, turns the test in, and leaves. The professor picks up his test to look it over, gets to the bonus question and starts to chuckle.
He announces to the class that he's changing the bonus question, from the above to "Write assembly to crash a computer."
Can't spell slaughter without laughter!
By the first exam I realized that the subject was a bit out of my league, so I gave up and had fun with the professor, writing stuff like "the 34th amendment says I don't have to answer this question", writing jokes instead of answers, and just making stuff up.
I knew this prof enough that I could get away with it (I previously showed up at an open-book exam wearing a hat with my notes stuffed in it and various notes written on my hands and arms). He graded on a severe curve and not out of 100% - a grade of 50 out of 300 could be passing. So he took it in stride. Mentioned that the 34th amendment didn't prevent him from giving me a negative score, pointed out the punchlines in my jokes were wrong and deducted points from that.
When I got the exam back, the front page read "-120/300, but don't worry, it'll come out in the curve".
As he's going through the answers, I and my friends are chuckling at the comments each of us made on the exam. Then the prof. got to the last question, a logic-based one (prove some theorem is correct). On that answer, I made up a rather lengthy logical path to prove the theory including a few references to handwaving. Turns out I was the closest to the correct answer.
Never went back to the class, but crypto is still cool.
I also had one of those somebody's-copying-your-answers-so-you-get-them-wr ong-on-purpose episodes. In my case, the copier had flunked every single test so far, and after copying all of my answers, proudly went up to the professor and loudly stated that he had aced the test this time, getting everybody's attention. The professor says, "Oh really? Let me grade it right now." It was multiple choice, so lickity split he had the grade. Somehow he had gotten them all wrong! He would have been better off guessing. After changing my answers, I proceeded to turn mine in for a perfect score.
While not exactly an exam story, I didn't get along very well with this one CS Prof. In one course, for all of the programming assignments, he would include "hints" or general suggestions or starter code. Unfortunately, usually it was bad advice, error prone or poorly conceived or whatever. There was a small contigent of about 5 CS students that I tutored, and it rather annoyed the Prof that we tended to get perfect scores plus extra credit while completely ignoring his "hints" and not really attending class. In some cases we were the only ones, because the rest of the class would never get a working program following his direction. Since it was graded by student graders, though, he couldn't really interfere too much. Note, these students didn't copy my work, I actually tutored them so they could write the programs themselves. I'm sure it gave him much satisfaction to give me an A- when I overslept the day of the final, missed half the time, and only got a B. This despite having a better than perfect score on every project.
In my E&M class, there was a group of people, I guess started by some ROTC guys, who would stand up before a test, and in unison chant something witty, ending with, "Make it hurt professor, make it hurt! Huh!" at which point they would sit down and begin.
Again, not a test example, but in my algorithms class, there was a term that our professor defined slightly differently than the book. The guys that I worked on the projects with, we didn't go to class, so we of course used the book's definition. On one major project, we were stumped for a long time. We kept looking at each other saying, well, if only it were defined this way, it would be trivially easy... Well, we eventually worked it out, and then decided to go to class to see if anybody else had too. When the prof asked if anybody had a solution to this problem, we were happy to share ours. The prof looked at us funny, not really understanding what we were presenting, and said, "Couldn't you just do this?" and we were like, no, that would violate this condition. He's like, that's not how it's defined, and we kinda look at each other and go, that's what the book says! The prof kind of harrumphs and goes, hmmm, I'll have to look into that. Needless to say, we were a little miffed, but that episode has stayed with me because our version required real creativity and insight. It was sweet vindication, though, when I high-scored the midterm. FWIW, the problem had something to do with Omega notation of strictly monotically increasing functions or something like that, and proving that some kind of bounding function did or didn't exist. I forget. Anyway, the difficulty was not so much conceptualizing a solution (which wasn't easy) but coming up with a concrete function that actually displayed the behavior.
I remember the day I took my SAT tests; I'd arrived at a nearby high school with a friend of mine and neither of us were sure which room to go to, having ambiguous directions and being unfamiliar with the building. As we wandered around, we began to realize we weren't the only ones who were unclear; more and more people began following us - did we somehow appear to know where we were going?
Eventually we began to feel like parents of ducklings, and just started to have fun with it... I especially remember walking up a flight of steps which ended with locked doors, turning around and walking back down the steps, with over a dozen people trailing us - the dirty looks we got on our way down from people still on their way up were hilarious.
And I don't know if it constitutes an "exam" story, but I only ever had to write one paper for my entire 4 years in high school... I researched and wrote up a good research paper on SDI ("Star Wars") during my freshman year, and was able to get by for the next 4 years simply by redrafting it each time - sometimes even for the same teachers. (I was probably the only student who had a computer with a printer in the mid-80s, which made it even easier)
As for cheating stories, the best crib sheets I made (Spanish vocab - grammar was easy, but I was crap at memorizing the words...) were laminated on paper which would fold out from underneath my watch.
And as for instructor stories, the English teacher who would misspell her comments on my papers is - too short a story to make more than one sentence, apparently.
Perfectly Normal Industries
It's strange that I got a better score on Math II than Math I. But maybe, if they grade on a curve and cap the top like you say, there weren't as many people taking Math II.
Still don't trust tests like that.
Infuriate left and right
The test was a total of 20 questions worth 10 points each. I put down partial answers for 8 of the questions over the next 2:15. 10 of the questions I did not understand, at all. Not even a hint of what the hell it was talking about.
I arrive to get my scores and was told that the breakdown of the class was as follows:
I was one of the 40 that got a zero. Changed my major from Economics to computer science that day. One day I'll tell the story of how I got my cognitive science degree
--Keith
200 Level Comp Sci
the guy in front of me smelled bad , wearing a tank top and shorts
smelt like he hadn't showered in 2 weeks.
alphabetical seating arangement
I almost walked out right awa, but you have to stay for 1 hour
I finished in 1 hour of the 3 hours allowed and left
that was the worse exam I ever went to.
passed too!
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
The best part in all this? The physics teacher was upset and angry, as he "didn't expect [me] to pass the AP exam because [I] didn't memorize all the equations[, but took time to derive them instead]". Heh.
A girl I went to middle school with was cheating of another gal's test.
She copied everything down so well that she wrote the other girl's name on her test
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
aparently at a prestegious all male high school on Long Island (near NYC) a group of enterprising students had taught themselves mores code so they could use groupthink during their exams. this worked quite well untill a alumni who had recently graduated from the naval acadamey came back to visit a few of his former teachers. He was in a classroom, talking to the teacher, while the students were taking a test. Then he suddenly shhhhhh-ed the teacher and listened intently to the tapping in the background. He walked over to a student desk and read part of the test paper. Then he announced to the class that 'number seven is not A but he was impressed with their cheating efforts.' T
he look on the teachers face must have been priceless; not to mention the looks on the students faces, they must have been trying very hard to keep from shitting themselves.
The more I learn about Windows the more I am surprised it runs at all
One day I had to supervise an exam which consisted of a written part and an oral part. I was sitting at the back of the room because that was the best place to watch the students.
The girl who was sitting right in front me was waiting for her oral exam, and she got bored. She decided to take out her wallet and start looking at every piece of paper in it. I had a good look on this and could even see what was on each piece of paper.
After she had finished her oral exam, I told her to never do that again, because not all supervisors might be that flexible.
I once took an exam with a double sided 100 question scantron form.
For some reason, whoever designed the exam felt it would be easier to use the same answer key for the front and back of the form. It's hard to imagine that it would require less work to organize all the exam questions that way than it would to make sure all the forms were turned the right way up before loading the machine, but someone apparently thought so.
Unfortunately it was an easy exam, so I didn't benefit all the much from recognizing the pattern. (Then again, if it has been a hard test, I might not have recognized the pattern at all.) Not a bad way to double-check one's answers, though.
A friend of mine was a graduate student in philosophy and was TA'ing for a Morality and Justice section. This class was centered around take-home essay responses to prompts.
When grading one of the responses from one of a rather lackluster student my friend found that the essay was unusually good. In fact, not only was it really good, it was uncannily familiar too. It finally dawned on him why.
It was his own paper that he had written when he took the section two years earlier! Apparently, the student had taken it upon himself to hack into Virginia Tech's student fileserver and download other students' works. And yet, after all that effort, he never noticed that the paper's owner was the TA himself!
-Grym
Took a CS class where weekly quizzes were multiple choice. The teacher was too lazy to grade, so instead we had to enter our answers in an Excel spreadsheet, which would then grade our quiz, and we'd print a hardcopy to turn in.
This was all rather silly (and I was acing the class), so one day I decided to figure out how the automatic grading worked. While the teacher was passing out the quizzes, I entered =Z1 in box A1 and then dragged it down 20 rows. Clicked score and then printed. My perfect score was coming out of the printer as the teacher handed me my quiz.
Is it cheating if you make it that obvious?
I remember being taught the same thing. But, now that I stop to consider it, it seems to me that strategy is total bunk.
Assuming test answer key is truly random and uniformly distributed, the chance that you'll win by picking any particular answer to any particular question is a fixed value. (1 / the number of choices.) It can't possibly depend on what one answered for other questions.
So, whether you always choose the same answer, or choose an answer at random for each question, or spell our "abcdeabcdeabcde" makes no difference.
To convince myself that I'm not doing something dumb here, I ran a quick monte
carlo simulation using random number generators. For a test consisting of 100 questions with 4 choices each, after one million tests the mean score and standard deviation are:
0.249993, 0.0433486 for totally random answers
0.250037, 0.0433170 for always choosing "C"
From that, the error on the mean (1 sigma) should be 4.32998e-05. The answer agree with each other and with the naive prediction. So, either strategy works equally well.
The only caveat is that we're assuming a truly random answer key. That means, for example, that "every answer to the exam is B" and "no answer is ever B" are both allowed answer keys. That's probably a reasonable assumption for an exam whose answer keys are generated automatically, such as any standardized test.
But, for a human-constructed test, it may be that large classes of solutions will be discarded by the test maker. It's not obvious how to model what a human would do in "randomly" laying out answers. Could be great fun to explore if one had access to thousands of scantron answer keys. (Anyone with a key to the exam repository room want to collaborate on actually doing that?) My guess is that since the vast majority of uniformly distributed random keys look qualitatively similar to human generated keys, the difference can't be large.
The obvious question is why test prep folks have been telling people bogus information for years? Either they are just bad at statistics (a scary thought, given the business they're in), or there's some psychological benefit to convincing people that picking the same letter will improve their score. Perhaps it's marginally faster during the exam? Hard to believe that's significant.
A day before a history exam, one of my friends went to the teachers room to ask a question. He was not there at that moment. The friend saw the standart envelope that exams are carried with, took away one of the papers, photocopied and spread those to all of the class. I also got one but didn't check the questions, folded and put it in my pocket.
When I left the school, i decided to tear that paper without looking and worked all night, studied all the book from start to end.
Next day when the exam papers were given out, you should have seen all the faces. The friend didn't put the paper back, the teacher counted the papers, understood the theft and changed all the questions.
I got the 3rd highest grade after two friends who didn't show up the day before the exam and didn't know the questions were stolen.
Conscience is a good thing.
less is more
Go to the student lounge the night before the End of Course exam, start drinking beer, let the guy from Aviano talk you into pulling an all-nighter, watch Clinton win his first presidential election while throwing darts, steal some pheasant from the freezer and fire up the grill, tell the folks who got up at 0400 to study the burnt-on-the-outside, frozen-on-the-inside chunks on the grill are "chicken", stagger back to your room at 0530 to sh*t, shower, shave, fall down in front of your roommate (who happens to be an AFOSI special agent) while attempting to put your uniform on, volunteer to lead reveille, bark out commands to the flag-raising detail while swaying back and forth at attention, report to class and piss-off half your flight-mates because you reek of beer and burnt pheasant, be the first to finish the exam and still get the top score of 98%.
Then go win the flight volley-ball championship in a come-from-behind thriller.
3rd Air Force Noncommisioned Officers Academy, RAF Upwood, United Kingdom, 1992 (I think).
What?
They had a blog but they stopped updating it after a while so I can only assume they died.
(Actually I think they ended up going to a doctor, heard some bad news and gave up on their scurvy quest)
But when I tried to locate the building where the exam would be administered, I discovered that I was at Strathclyde University, not the University of Glasgow, which is in an altogether different part of the city. By this time it was too late to get to the right university and find a place to sleep there.
This was all very much before MapQuest or anything of that sort existed, so I had to humiliate myself by explaining to people my stupid-foreigner mistake ("Y'all have more than one university?") to get help figuring out where exactly I needed to go and how to get there on time. After a brief, not-very-restful night's sleep, I got up before dawn the next morning (this was December in Scotland, after all), caught the very first bus of the day running from the one uni to the other, and sprinted the remaining few blocks to get to the testing room. I got to the door as the last person in line was being admitted, with about a minute and a half to spare.
I still managed to score in the 98-99th percentiles on the three general exams and 92nd percentile on the Comp Sci exam, so I guess the adrenaline of my frantic dash to the hall made up for my lack of sleep the night before.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
In High School, I had a great Art teacher (Ms Young) who ultimately pointed me to my current carreer (graphic designer). A friend of mine and I took her Art History course one year, and did pretty well. She told us that the final for the year was going to be tough, and covered the whole year's material. But, we could "team up" on the test, and consult in small groups during the test. (I suspect that if the whole class had "teamed up", she would have allowed it, but we didn't think of it back then). My friend and I took the material, divided it in 2, and each studied half. Then we kind of skimmed the other person's half, just in case.
Come test day, we blew through the test pretty quick. It wasn't as hard as we thought, and typically one or both of us knew the answer to the question. One the questions that we were both stumped, we guessed and did pretty well. In the back of the class, about a half-dozen of the "popular" kids, who had screwed around all year, teamed up on their tests, but from what we could hear, weren't doing well.
A few days later, Ms. Young informed us that, if she had graded normally, about 1/3 of the class (including the table of "popular" kids, we found out later) would have failed the test. So, she curved her grading so that only a few people still failed, and the majority passed. My friend and I did very well, with nearly perfect scores, but after the curve, we ended up with 4.5 (out of 4.0) for the test, and ultimately A+ for the year.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
In college, I had to take an "Art since 1945" course for my major (Studio Art). The instructor's test were divided into 2 parts: a slide identification section, and an essay section. Once everyone had the test, he would show slides of different pieces, and we had to write down the artist and name of the piece. After he had gone through all the slides, the majority of the students would move onto the essays, but some would need another look at the slides, so he would go back to any slide if you asked.
During a somewhat difficult test, after the first run through of the slides, a couple of students were asking for another look at some of the more difficult slides. One student, who apparently had the artist but not the name of a slide, asked "Can you put the Polluck back up, please?" (instead of asking for it by slide #). Without thinking, the instuctor put up the Polluck slide.
There was a moment of silence, and then another student snickered. The instructor realized what he had done (told the class that the slide that was being shown was from Polluck), and turned red. A couple of other students, who had incorrect answers, quickly changed their sheets, and more people were chuckling. Finally, the instructor announced "As some of you have caught on, this piece is from Jackson Polluck. Make sure you have this slide labelled correctly." so that everyone else could benefit from his blunder.
If I remember correctly, someone tried the same thing at the next test, but he didn't fall for it again.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Exam 1 - nice tables for each student...hmmmm
Exam 2 - bring table cloth and candles for relaxing atmosphere. Prof (http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/users/gjs/gjs.html) walks by and asks "Where's your martini?"
Exam 3 - ok then, same setup but this time cocktail shaker full of vodka/vermouth and two martini glasses.
The good old days of MIT when you could be 18 and drink responsibly.....
When I was in graduate school, the book store ran out of a book I needed for a course. I guess I'm lazy, as I was the only person in the class who wound up without a copy. I borrowed a copy from a friend and photocopied the whole darn thing (that actually wound up costing slightly more than the book cost and I went through a lifetime supply of nickels).
For the final exam, the professor said it was an open note test. Anything we wrote or photocopied we could bring. Someone even asked could we photocopy pages from the book. The professor laughed and said if we wanted to, we could photocopy the book and make it an open book test.
Well, since I already _had_ a photocopied book, the test was open book for me.
I didn't use it, but it sure was nice to have it.
In my numerical methods class, we were taught two different methods to solve a particular problem. While studying for the midterm, my friends and I only studied one of them because it was faster to solve in an exam. Sure enough, we opened the midterm and found "Solve this problem by the method 'foo'.", where "foo" is obviously the method we hadn't studied.
All of us tried to remember as best we could, but we all bombed it. All except my friend Chris. He remarked that the front of the paper said "Write down any assumptions you make." so he took out a black Sharpie, coloured in the part "by the method 'foo'." and wrote "assume these words do not exist" and proceeded to solve the problem by the other method. When the exams came back, he was awarded about 20% on that question, with the annotation "These are amusement marks. Normally you would have gotten 0."
All subsequent exams had "Write down and justify any assumptions you make."
You know non US-ians have to take GRE's too... At least if they want to go to Grad school in the US. In fact among Physics majors, its common knowledge that the foreign students -will- end up scoring higher on the Physics GRE than their American counterparts. Allegedly this is due to differing ways of teaching undergrad physics, ie teaching literally FOR the test... Well that and American universities require various and sundry other non major related courses (which I am in no way bashing, merely pointing out) But fortunately, something like 90% of American Physics students who do well enough to go to grad school (in America) get paid to go (simply due to their sheer minority).
I was studying for the GREs (the subject test, which is hard -- at least in physics, where overseas students study question banks all year and wreck the curve -- not the general one.) A friend of mine and I were in the local cafe at different desks drilling all the inane formulae you need to remember. This was back when I smoked.
Anyway, I'm sitting there working away, and this insanely beautiful woman I've never seen before walks in and sits down across from me at my tiny table. She is Middle Eastern-looking, so hot I now understand why suicide bombers do it for the seventy-two. Doing all this sultry stuff with her eyes. Anyway.
She takes a cigarette from my pack and waits for me to light it, which I do kind of shakily because I've never been hit on in this extremely hardcore fashion. My mind is processing two very incompatible pieces of information. Career as physicist... extremely hot woman right now... career as physicist... extremely hot woman right now...
As you can imagine, because I am a loser, I then very awkwardly explained why she had to leave now (even more awkward because up to this point nobody had said anything and the cafe was rather quiet.) I've never seen a woman look so disgusted with me in my life. After she left the cafe I turned to my friend and I was like, you saw that, right, you totally saw that.
I feel like I spend half my life in cafes. Never has anything remotely like it ever happened again. I have angered the cafe gods and it will never happen again.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
The exam was the next day. We had put off studying the horrible thing until the last possible moment.
And it happened RIGHT HERE. Oh the trauma.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
It was the day of the final and I locked the keys in my car after I parked on campus. I didn't have AAA, and none of my friends who had AAA were anywhere nearby. I called campus police, and they said the guy who could help me unlock my car was leaving in a few hours, actually right about the time that the class period for my final was over (it was an evening class). So I raced through the final, working as fast as I could. I turned in my test 10 minutes early to the surprise of everyone in the room and ran out to call campus police, but the locksmith left already. Fortunately I still aced the final, and a friend helped me unlock the car with a coat hanger. So it all worked out.
I was really good in my high-school chem class, and I only looked at the book once over the entire year. I don't think I was the only one, and come an exam, one of the questions was: "What chapter of the book was this quiz on." Hardest question in the entire semester.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
Way back when I was in school we were put into rooms, two to a room. (To make it harder to cheat, maybe? Not sure.) The girl I was with was a professional model, daughter of a supermodel. And I'm trying to concentrate on the test when she starts laughing. Now there are no teachers around, hell we could have made out right there on the table and no one would have noticed. I'm like, "What's up, Vanessa?" "Oh nothing... it's just... my necklace is ticking... can you take it off for me?" So, rather stupidly, I get up, take off her necklace, and sit back down again and focus on the test. She glares at me, and starts giggling again. "What's up, Vanessa?" "Oh nothing... my shirt's tickling me..."
And that's when I clue in. "Yeah, well please dont take that off, ok?" She glared at me for the rest of the test and we never talked again. God I was such a dork.
I'm entirely willing to ask your employer for a clarification and conclude this discussion before it is archived. You can contact me via email.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
During the final examination, a lightning storm raged outside. I was working furiously because I was behind, and then the power went out. Almost all the lights in the exam hall went out, and there were no windows as it was the gymnasium where basketballs normally fly here and there.
Of course everybody burst out laughing and the teachers tried to calm everybody down and prevent them from talking. Me, I just kept working frantically and finishing as many questions as possible with the tiny amount of light available. Most others were stalled because their calculators were solar power only, while mine was dual powered.
The lights came on after about five minutes, and the teachers gave us another five minutes in the alotted time. I have to thank the weather / diety / whatever for that power outage, because without the extra five minutes, I wouldn't have finished the exam.
Half-way into a brutal week-long cold/sinus infection, the prof tells me he can't let me delay taking the test any longer. I knew the stuff OK, I just had this horrendous fever. I asked someone to drive me there, staggered blindly in and could barely make it to the seat. Once the test appeared in front of me, something weird happened, my whole brain but the math part switched off, and there was perfect mathematical understanding. I utterly aced the test, staggered back out, and crashed for the rest of the week. I did okay in math after that, but it was never like that utter mastery.
Recently I took an Engineering Physics midterm. A group of us got together in the library(it was takehome) and struggled for no avail for several hours. All in all the test took us close to 15 hours to complete, and we all felt that we failed miseribly. Our backup plan even failed. We e-mail the test to a physicist one of the group members is related to! After being mentally beat down and discouraged, we got the tests back and all recieved A's. BTW Awesome class!