Word: exam
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...have, I must confess, serious doubts about the efficacy--or even the integrity--of the "classic" exam period editorial, "Beating the System" you reprinted recently. I almost suspect this so-called "Donald Carswell '50" of being rather one of Us--the Bad Guys--than one of you. If your readers have been following Mr. Carswell's advice for the last 11 years, then your readers have been going down the tubes. It is time to disillusion...
Artful equivocations are even worse; lynx-eyed sly little rascals that we are, we see right through them. (Up to exam 40. Then our lynz eyes droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough...
...Exam period brings out the worst in us. Crimson editors have attempted over the years to express in words the feelings (desperation, hatred, nausea) that overcome Harvard students when we realize the amount of class work we have ignored during the semester...
...office. Two members of the office's staff came. One of them asked, with some hostility, what more I could have expected their office to do for me. The professor of the course was summoned and arrived half an hour later. He identified two or three symbols on the exam for the proctor and then left. Unfortunately the exam contained many more elementary notations which he presumably expected the proctor to know but with which the proctor was in fact unfamiliar. The examination was further disrupted when, due to a mistake on the part of the scheduling office...
These were, needless to say, extremely adverse conditions under which to take an examination. My failing grade on the exam did not come as a surprise. Yet the problems I encountered could have been easily avoided had the University only taken care to find a proctor who was comfortable reading mathematical notations out loud...