A friend of mine in high school once got away with this on a multi-part question on an algebra test:
Q: Given the equation you found in answer to the last question, can you find the value of X?
A: Yes.
He had to argue with the teacher for a bit but eventually she relented.
The likely apocryphal story I’ve often heard is about a student in a philosophy class:
Q: Is this a question?
A: If this is an answer.
Not exactly a story of valor, but certainly a case of Cool Minds vs Overboiled Brains.
When my father got his “bachillerato superior” (more or less equivalent to today’s high school degrees), it was necessary to pass a series of final government-sponsored tests. It didn’t matter if your teachers said you palyed piano like the angels: if one of your subjects had been piano and the government’s teachers said you playes like Unseen University’s Librarian after going without bananas for too long, you had to go back to school. These exams had to be taken at the University District, in this case 200km away. The students from Dad’s school got there by train; it was three days of one exam after another.
One of the exams was math. Half the students there handed in the papers within 5 minutes. The other half took up the whole 3 hours alloted. Those students who went real fast got 10s; those who took the whole time, 0s.
The exam had a single problem. Its exposition was very long, with many numbers and references to integrals and logarithms… but the actual question came down to “2+2=?”
Those students who realized that all they had to write was
2+2=4
got the highest possible grade.
Thoses who tried to use every single piece of data mentioned in the problem… well, maybe their math was fine, but they sure failed “reading comprehension”!
I recalled another incident that happened to me. This was a preface, if that the right word, to a lesson on Transactional Analysis".
We had a test placed on our desks w/ a blank cover sheet. We we told there were 100 questions on the test and each had a right/wrong, true/false answer. We were given a ridiculously short time to finish the test, something like 3 minutes,
We were then told to lift the cover sheet and begin.
At the top of the page was a statement, rather than a question. It said, “Proceed to question #100.”
Then there was question number one. There were probably 15-20 of us in the class and I don’t think anyone heeded the first sentence on page one.
As I recall the final question, which none of us got to, was something like, “Sign your name and turn in your test to the instructor.”
Isn’t the latter answer only acceptable if the student also happens to be a parent?
When I was in 6th grade some friends were in a class with this incredibly easy teacher. A question might be something like this:
What is an electron?
A) Kangaroo
B) Negatively charged particle
C) Mr. Taylor (the teacher’s name)
He was also known for often missing wrong answers on tests.
My friend wrote something along the lines of “This is a very good question Mr. Taylor, I’ll have to get back to you on that one” as the answer to an essay question and the teacher marked it correct.
I liked the scene in Dead Poets Society where Keating is showing the boys how, if three or more walk together, they will eventually march in time. He encouraged them to walk their own way, not to conform, and all the boys except one begins walking, waddling, goosestepping, chicken pecking, out in the courtyard.
Mr. Keating turns to the one boy, Charlie, leaning against the pillar, asking if he will be joining them.
“Exercising the right not to walk, sir,” Charlie replies with a grin, to which Mr. Keating nods approvingly.
I remember a similar story. I can’t remember what the paper was about, nothing or something similar. The student handed in ten blank sheets of paper.
He failed.
Why? Because it had a title page.
These are brilliant. I’d only ever heard the why?/why not? one, but I love all the others too.
I saw a silly .gif file recently of a mathematics question with one side of a triangle marked x. The question: Find x.
The solution: a big arrow pointing to the x with HERE IT IS!
I got a little thumbnail that says ‘some rights reserved’, but is not named the same as the image in your link.
Sometimes the teachers are the clever ones!
I had a high school health teacher give us a final exam after our unit on alcohol and drug use and peer pressure. It was 50 statements, all true/false. Except every answer was “True”, and none of them were particularly hard. It was hilarious watching the rest of the class. Numbers 1-5 all went pretty smoothly. By number 10, people started glancing around nervously. By 20, there were definite sweat beads going on, and by 25, hands started shooting up.
The point, according to the teacher afterwards, was an object lesson in being unsure of yourself even when you know the right answer: just like we’d have to be when our friend offered us drugs at a party.
Not exactly on topic, but this thread reminds me of the story (not sure how true it is) about Victor Hugo - he wanted a progress report on the publication of an edition of Les Miserables, so he wrote to them, saying:
They replied:
Once for “Plastic Expression” we were supposed to choose an artist and convey his style in a 50x50 cm piece of white canvas. I just came with a blank canvas (for Ives Tanguy) and talked about it for about 10 minutes. Got the top grade for it 
It was a bit scary as some other smart arse had done just a penciled circle for Picasso. The professor didn’t even let him talk. He just said “a circle says everything” and also gave him a top grade.
As for gradings, a friend got his calculus exam with no corrections and no marks other than a little line on every corner of the page. When he asked the professor why his paper wasn’t graded, he replied “It is, do you see those lines on each corner? That a zero so big that it doesn’t fit on the page”
Andrew Tobias tells this story in one of his books:
At Harvard Business School he was taking a class on pricing or somesuch. It was early in the first year, all the students were nervous, taking themselves too seriously. The Prof lectured them on how to determine the correct price for a widget. As homework, he gave them a huge pile of data and told them to find the correct price for the product. Tobias did not do the homework. Seeing his clean desk, the teacher called on him.
“Since the case said the factory was running at full-tilt, there is no need to charge less, we cannot increase sales. Since the case said the market was very competitive, there is no way to charge more. So I didn’t run the figures.”
He was right. The teacher dismissed the class early.
This thread puts me in mind of the more negative “I know it sounds like an urban legend but honestly it happened to my brother’s friend’s cousin” stories that:
a) a student had left it too late to revise properly, so crammed everything into the last few days before their final exam while snorting copious amounts of amphetamines. They came out of the exam on top of the world, really confident, but were amazed to fail dismally with 0%. Turns out they’d been so hepped up on goofballs that they’d just written their own name over and over again, like off of The Shining.
b) a similar - or possibly even the same - student was incredibly depressed, and thinking he was going to fail and his life was not worth living, got the two pencils that had been left on the desk, put one up each nostril, and smashed his head down onto the desk, firing the pencils into his brain and killing himself.
c) a student had been so poor on semester that all he could afford to buy was a huge bag of oats, so he made a big batch of porridge, then poured it into his desk drawer, where it solidified, and he just broke pieces off it to live off during the term. And he got scurvy!
Honest, my brother’s friend’s cousin told me.
My dad had a college chem professor who was explaining alkalinity in urine. The prof said that while there were many tests for determining alkalinity, a taste test was most effective. He dipped a finger into a beaker of urine and then tasted it. He then told the students to do exactly what he did. Squeamishly and shuddering, they all did. Then he noted that he had dipped in his middle finger, but licked his index finger. This was intended to teach them the necessity of close observation. :dubious:
I don’t get it. Why would this be considered correct?
In a high school chemistry class, we had a wise-ass teacher who gave us the test as follows:
It’s got about 50 questions, over two pages. Tough questions, lots of math, very time-consuming. At the top, it says to read all the questions before you begin working on them.
The 50th question read: If you are reading this now, regardless of any other work you’ve done, you’re done. You get an A. Say nothing. Hand in your test and leave.
In a college music theory class, we had to identify chord types by sound. The teacher would play a chord at the piano, and we’d have to tell him whether it was an augmented 7th chord or whatever.
Teacher: (plays chord) Okay, what chord was that?
Student: Don’t you know?
Same here, in Firefox. It shows up in IE, though. Puzzling.
My son took a Leadership class in high school last semester. One day, the teacher is sitting up front, music cranked, feet up on his desk, reading a paper.
All the kids file in, sit down, and wait. 10 minutes pass, and the teacher is still flipping through the paper.
Turns out he was waiting for one of the students to show “leadership” and ask the teacher when class was going to start. I thought it was a bit unfair, because high school kids don’t normally have the confidence to question a teacher’s behavior, but it made a lasting impression on my son.
In my final Dutch Highschool exam for English language and literature (a foreign language to us) my English teacher asked me about “1984”, the novel by George Orwell.
He asked me an standard question: “In what way does Winston Smith’s character change?”. I answered: “It doesn’t really change, does it?”
Apparently that was an unexpected and unusual answer, because my teacher sat up straight in his chair. " “How so?” he asked. “Well,” I said. “I’s more like it lessens.”
I didn’t need to say more, and got an A. 