Word: exams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...University Health Services, a nurse told me I had to take the exam anyway and sent me back to Stoughton. By now I was really desperate. I would fail my exams and all that frantic studying would be as useless as the entire first semester. After shivering by myself for an hour, I finally gave in and woke up a friend across the hall who sent me to stand, shaking, under the shower until the exam. I took it in a complete stupor, barely aware of what I was writing. I begged my section leader for mercy, staggered home, slept...
Sick as I was then, I was soon to be sicker. Exhausted after my first exam and facing two more in the next two days, I took a No-Doz to stay awake and study. I stayed awake all right, and began hyperventilating around 5 a.m., when I realized that I would never get to sleep. Terrified, I woke up my proctor, who sleepily told me to go the the infirmary. "That's okay. Good luck." SLAM...
THAT ENDED my first semester at Harvard. I sat in my empty room over the four-day break between exam period and second semester, washing clothes, reading, thinking, recuperating. I had spent my semester detached, passively accepting academic boredom and loneliness. I had cried and raged and stormed, but I hadn't done anything. I was as sick of myself as I was of Harvard, sick of trying to turn Harvard into Andover...
...studies. But by their nature--and Harvard's unwillingness to support them in large quantities--they benefit only a lucky few. The multitudes sit in large, generally uncomfortable lecture halls, stare at the professor (or out the window), mechanically take notes they will stow away until right before an exam, and wait impatiently for the hour...
...reading books, which can't be too bad, and writing papers, which can be good or bad depending on how intriguing the topic is and how constructive the comments you receive are. But in most cases your grade will be based on you performance on a three-hour final exam. In other words, many of the students who do well in these courses pull it off by doing nothing all semester and then spending the two-week Reading Period doing just that to prepare themselves for the exam. You can guess that this is not the ideal way to learn...