Your Best Exam Stories? 247
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."
Re:Caught cheating (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Memorisation (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Memorisation (Score:1, Insightful)
my conscience saved me! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Caught cheating (Score:2, Insightful)
> 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.