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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.
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
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.
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.
I loved being the girl in the programming courses doing the same thing. It was usually 10:1 guys to gals in them, and I'd wear my shortest skirt and sit the furthest from the door so that when I got done first, I'd have to meander through the tables and chairs to turn in my test.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
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.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
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.
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.
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
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.
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