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."
Physics, Freshman year, first semester (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Best final exam? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not just once (Score:3, Interesting)
Real use for a #2 Pencil (Score:4, Interesting)
"Help" him cheat with bad answers (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Wrong room (Score:3, Interesting)
General Education Class (Score:2, Interesting)
The Surreal Exam (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
A Few Stories (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:Invisible Ink Cheatsheets (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:24-hour time (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a year before I took another math class. A friend came by the night before the test and asked me if I would go over the whole course with him since he hadn't gone to class. Teaching someone else really is the best review. I finished a three hour final in 20 minutes. As I walked to the front with my test someone asked, "Are you just giving up?" "I sure am!" I replied. I got a 97.
Later still I had two Portuguese classes on the same day. One was a Phd level course that I was the only undergrad in and I had a presentation to give for a full hour. I spent the entire day preparing for it and skipped my other classes. Two days later I show up in my other Portuguese class which was mostly full of jocks. A girl from the volleyball team asked me if I was dropping the class. I asked why she would think that. "Well, you didn't show up for the mid-term on Tuesday..." I suddenly realized what had happened. I went up to the prof after class and he was very nice about it. He said I could take an oral exam on the spot in place of the midterm. Halfway through my first response he stopped me, told me it was clear that I was the only person in the class that had read the material, and offered me a scholarship to study in Lisbon that summer. I should have skipped more mid-terms...
Blind Luck (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Nuclear War What's In It for You. (Score:4, Interesting)
But the last final I ever took in college was my scariest. I hadn't attended the class since the mid-term, the teacher was just so horrible, I was convinced I could learn better from the book. So, I avoided my STAT class, and forgot entirely to read the book. End of the year came around, and I realized, that this was the only class I wasn't sure about passing and I needed it to graduate.
I teamed up with another guy in the same boat as me (we both had good mid-term scores, but then neglected the rest of the class.) We both ended up studying till all hours of the night.
I walked into class after this rigerous night of studying and took the test, I ended up with an almost perfect score, and what with the curve, I actually ended up with an A in the course.
Afterwards, I walked out of the building to walk home, and to my surprise my car was parked there in the teachers' lot. I had driven it in during the night when it was allowed to park there, and entirely forgot about it.
Auditing a Cryptography class... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re: Tossing out the cheater (Score:2, Interesting)
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From: Michael J Lutz
Subject: Finals Scam: Revenge of the Profs.
The Finals Week item, with 50 things to do during a final you know you will flunk, inspires me to pass along this true story from RIT. Acknowledgements are due my colleague Ken Reek, and former graduate student Ed Ford, who together pulled the scam off with aplomb.
Several years ago, Ken was assigned two sections of a large service course taken primarily by business students. The final exam was multiple choice, and had a well-deserved reputation for being easy to cheat on (one proctor, 250-300 students). Ken was determined to plug this hole, at least for one term.
One nice thing about such a large class is that no student knows everyone else who is enrolled. Using this, Ken asked Ed to attend the final and pretend to take it like everyone else. Ken also told Ed to be as blatent as possible about cheating.
At the start of the exam, Ken announced that anyone caught cheating off another student's paper would have his or her exam confiscated and would fail the course. As the exam progressed, Ed was peering all around, while Ken periodically called out "eyes on your own paper." After about three such warnings, Ken bounded up the stairs, crossed to Ed's seat, grabbed the exam, tore it to shreds, and shouted "You're outta here!" According to Ken, Ed's facial expression was a perfect combination of shock and terror.
For the rest of the exam, the room resembled a monastery where monks were carefully and studiously working on sacred scrolls.
Mike Lutz
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY 14623
Re:Memorisation (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. When I was at MOP (Mathematical Olympiad Program, AKA Mathcamp, where the US participants in the IMO are chosen/trained) many of the teachers used exactly that method. Po-Shen I remember was the worst/best. We all got used to seeing him start to write out a formula, pause in the middle, scribble a few things off on the side, and then finish--numerous times per class.
Probably it works well for some people and not so well for others.
State your assumptions (Score:3, Interesting)
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."