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"Please Ensure You Have the Correct Number of Jokes Before
Continuing"
Now Playing: "Dead Girls" by Voltaire
Hello and welcome to the exciting and/or not exciting continuation
of the "Exams" series. I'm sure most of you have come over here for
some relief from the misdirected anger of some unnamed Points in
Case columnist who apparently was denied parole this week and
decided to take it out on me. But there's no time to waste on a
shouting match, folks! Exam time is rolling towards us faster than
those giant logs in Pitfall, and so I present to you a much-needed
primer on finals. Praise Allah! Here's what happened:
-Chances are, at some point in your
college career, you will be faced with a multiple choice exam.
Sometimes this will be a good old-fashioned test of knowledge, with
one correct answer mixed in with 3 or 4 incorrect ones. More often,
though, you will receive a "multiple" choice exam consisting of over
10 choices, always including "all of the above," "none of the
above," and the dreaded "more than one of the above". Let's get
something straight here: That's not multiple choice. That's infinite
choice. Stephen Hawking himself couldn't deduce the answer from
those options. If the prof is going to mentally fist me I wish he'd
at least have the decency to call the test what it really is: "Pick
(c) at Random and Hope for the Best." Either that or at least use
some lubricant.
-Another popular exam type is the "long answer," or "essay" exam.
This exam usually contains one or two very brief sentences, followed
by the ubiquitous word "Discuss." You get a booklet filled with
empty, lined pages (although technically the lines preclude the
pages from being empty) and you have two hours to churn out what
invariably turns out to be a rambling, incoherent series of sentence
fragments, not entirely unlike this column. Your best bet is to
answer a completely different question from the one posed, and mask
this insolence with prohibitively poor penmanship. It doesn't matter
what you write down, you could be writing erotic Dragonball
fanfiction for all I care, so long as you JUST KEEP WRITING AND MAKE
IT UNINTELLIGIBLE. Use your other hand if you have to. The prof will
have no choice but to give you a passing grade to cover up the fact
that they can't read a word you wrote. After all, he wouldn't want
to look stupid in front of his students.
-It may seem as though there is no exam easier than a true/false
test. After all, there's only two options, right? Either the
statement is the cold, irrefutable truth or a dirty goddamned lie.
True: Your professor will tell you that, because of the subtlety of
the questions posed, this test will be just as difficult as an essay
or multiple choice test. False: Your professor wouldn't lie about
something as important as this. True/false tests are the easiest
tests known to personkind. I once saw a chicken in Arizona that
could play tic-tac-toe and win. I have no doubt it could also be
trained to peck a T or F into the dirt or corn or whatever the hell
chickens walk on. If you can't ace a true/false test you might as
well find yourself a fez and an accordion, because the only career
you'll ever have will involve people throwing pennies, you pathetic
organ-grinding chimp. And that's the truth.
-Off-Topic Corner Live: I saw a giant banner on a sidewalk bench
that said "You Just Proved Bench Advertising Works," along with a
phone number to call to place your own ad in that space. I chuckled
for a moment, thinking how cool it would be to advertise Text-Heavy
that way. Then I forgot the number and never thought about the idea
ever again. So I guess that proves it doesn't. Discuss.
-While you're writing an exam, the invigilator (who's so desperate
for a reason to exist that he actually gave an important-sounding
name to a job that consists entirely of sitting at a desk and
drinking coffee, not entirely unlike my own) will be charged with
the uber-important task of keeping time. This will probably be done
by way of an analog clock drawn on the blackboard, which, thanks to
modern anti-racism legislation, is no longer permitted to be black.
It could be green or magenta or key-lime. But not black. Anyway,
some invigilators will alter the analog clock to reflect the correct
time once every half hour. Some every fifteen minutes. However, on
occasion you get those rare test invigilators who love their job so
much that they'll change the time on the chalk clock every 5
minutes. If you point out that this will still make the clock
inaccurate for 80% of the minutes, you might be able to get the guy
to actually change the time at the front of the room every single
minute. Bonus points if you can convince him to add a second hand.
-The first page of every exam will invariably contain the course
title, the date, and a statement such as "This exam contains 11
pages, including the one you are reading now. Please make sure you
have the correct number of pages before you begin." Is this really
necessary? Not the part about telling you how many pages the exam
has. I'm sure there have been plenty of people who finished an exam
that, due to clerical error, was only a quarter the length it was
meant to be and they thought they were pretty darn clever for being
the first one to leave. I'm talking about the part that says
"including the one you are reading now." Couldn't they eliminate
that page and make each exam 10 pages long instead? Where's
Greenpeace when you need them?
-The last page of every exam contains a spiritually uplifting
end-of-semester message, such as "Have a Good Summer!" or "Godspeed,
Masked Avenger!" If you are taking a science course, the last page
will also contain a Far Side cartoon with a link to the subject at
hand that is tenuous, at best. Like that one with young Albert
Einstein as a punk-ass scientist with a mohawk. I guess the
spiritually uplifting message there is "Not only did you just fail
the course that will keep you out of grad school, but you can't even
understand vaguely esoteric comic strips. Have a good summer!"
-Over time, universities have
developed unbelievably strict rules to keep you, the modern hoodlum,
from cheating on your exam. For example, they have banned water
bottles, sunglasses, headphones, baseball caps and just about
anything else on which you could potentially write answers from the
examination room. Apparently people aren't just cheating, they're
cheating in ways that are both genuinely creative and prohibitively
time consuming. If you have the motivation to write out all your
notes on the inside of a pair of sunglasses I think you deserve an
A. Some wily invigilators even hold your calculator up to the light
to make sure you haven't etched formulas on the case like
hieroglyphics. Somebody pointed out that none of this stops people
from simply leaving to go to the washroom and checking their notes
while they're at it, so now if you have to pee they send a guy with
you to the lavatory to keep things in line. I imagine next year
they'll begin performing digital rectal exams before and after you
leave the room. And I'm okay with that so long as they don't make me
take off my sunglasses.
-For all their overprotective anti-cheating measures, I'd have to
say the one that's least productive of all is when they make you
take your student card with you to the exam, so they can verify that
it's actually you who is writing this exam and not your smart Asian
friend. People have no problem using a fake ID to get into bars. Why
on Earth would an exam be any different? The only difference is
instead of looking for someone who kinda sorta but not really looks
like you and is of drinking age, you want to find someone who kinda
sorta but not really looks like you and has an IQ high enough to
beat a chicken at tic-tac-toe. I bet he'll understand that comic
strip.
-Quote of the Moment: The stress of an exam can make people say
irrelevant and frequently hilarious things. While I was writing a
final, someone across the room blurted out, totally out of nowhere:
"Hey! Why is everyone named Bertha fat?" After a moment of
confusion, I replied: "How many people named Bertha do you even
know?" My theory is that nobody's ever called their daughter Bertha
because of the stigma attached to the name. Do you agree or
disagree? Discuss. You have 11, no, 10 minutes.
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