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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In response to all of those who are against cheating... I dislike cheating as well, its dishonest. But we must really ask ourselves what kind of educational system we have that makes kids WANT to cheat. Instead of fostering a system in which education is a fun and enjoyable activity we promote one where kids fill a pressure to pass: passing becomes more important than learning. On the one hand I think that honesty is an important value that must be supported, but a part of me says: let them cheat, they'll soon enough encounter the real world and figure out what they really needed to know and what they didn't.
Looking back on my school days, I remember often doing exams "in group", where we'll take a crack at the exams and compare answers, learning how to work with other people under pressure was (I now think) more important than knowing how to figure out complicated integrals alone (and when was the last time I did that). If caught, this kind of thing is considered cheating. I used to not like school that much, until the point where courses got difficult enough that other students were there because they wanted to; difficult enough that we could bring out calculators and text books in the exams and still spend 8 hours doing them (I distinctly remember some EE Linear Control exams). The teacher would let us take smoking breaks and bring lunch. Copying someone elses exam wasn't an option, because of the pages and pages of calculations we had to show for our efforts.
Somewhat related but not really cheating... as a physics major in college we were often allowed one sheet of notes to use in an exam. The profs were usually pretty savy so they would be very clear that it had to be 8.5" x 11" and they oftentimes further stipulated that you could only use one side. I don't remember if I came up with this or if someone showed me but somewhere along the line I started using colored pencils to write on my gouge sheets. Using colored pencils, you can actually layer information on your gouge sheet. I recommend using a moderately dark color(graphite, blue, green, brown) for the bulk of your notes (text, equations, etc) and then adding layers of lighter colors (yellow, light green, light orange) over the darker colors. I also recommend you save the higher layers for things like figures and example plots, right over your previous notes. It looks a little busy, but you would be amazed at how easy your brain can pick out the information when it is color coded! Play with the color combinations a bit first (RGB work well). Sorry in advance if anyone out there is color blind...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
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
> But we must really ask ourselves what kind of educational system we have that makes
> kids WANT to cheat
You don't have to *make* people want to cheat; people just naturally want to cheat. I've even caught myself thinking up (sometimes elaborate) ways to cheat, even though I'm one of those guys the other kids always despised for breaking curves. (I'm not much smarter than average (honest, I'm not), but I perform well under pressure (don't get nervous, and when I have a mental block on a question I just mark it in the margin and come back later), and I tend to study rather more than average.) And it wasn't because I cared about the grades either; I was never motivated by grades. I studied because I wanted to understand the material.
I thought up (albeit never used) ways to cheat for no good reason, just, uhm, *because*. It's part of human nature.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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."