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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
God damnit, you couldn't have posted this 15 years ago for me? That's the kind of thinking that gets people nobel prizes.
Run with Scissors!
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
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.)
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.
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'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 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.
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
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!
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
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