Once I turned off my alarm clock in my sleep. If I hadn’t had a roommate, I’d have slept through my 8am psychology final. Fortunately, I did have a roommate… and it took me five minutes to run to campus after she woke me up at 8:05.
I once missed a psychology exam completely with no valid excuse, just got the date and time wrong. Luckily I was the teacher’s favorite so she let me retake it two days later w/o even batting an eye.
Still, that doesn’t stop me from having that darn dream every few months. I just had it last night, except it was even worse! I missed a big exam that I was required to pass to get my job, and then the day after I lost a card gaming duel to a giant bird-man and for my loss he blinded me! On the upside, my disability let me get the job out of pity…
Ditto the bold for me, but it had been rescheduled to an hour earlier 
I once was so sick with the flu, I set an alarm for an exam, got up and had my dad drive me, came home and went right back to sleep. Woke up again several hours later and remembered nothing about the exam. I was convinced I had slept through and missed it.
Did you pass?
I had a midterm for Chemistry 1C (I think 15 or 20% of our grade) my freshman year as a Chem E student that I overslept on. It was at 9 AM, and the professor had been very clear that latecomers would not be accepted. The girl I was with at the time lived in the same dormitory as me, and she had an 8:00 class that she came back from like at 9:10. She saw my bike outside and went to my room to check on me and sure enough, there I was sleeping peacefully in my bed, my phone alarm set to 9PM or something silly like that.
After waking up, freaking out, throwing on a shirt and running out the door, I faced a long ride completely across campus, that I made in record time with a huge adrenaline rush fueling me forward. I got to the maybe 150 student class, ran in in a big huff, and the teacher wordlessly (but with a smile!) handed me a test, and I was able to finish it before time ran out as it was really short: 5 multiple choice questions. I did really badly (I think I got 2 of them), but I managed to later work my way up in that class and get an A.
My program prints up and posts publicly the final exam schedule weeks prior to finals week; copies are emailed to the students, and those professors who give finals repeatedly announce in the month before the end of term when the final exams are scheduled.
As my colleagues in the trenches above note, the diligent students will make a note of the schedule, whereas some of the students either don’t pay attention, or haven’t been attending, so they manage to evade all notice of the schedule. I announce tests, quizzes, and due dates repeatedly over the semester, and always have a percentage who are greatly surprised to walk in to discover that something was due that day.
Meanwhile, I also don’t give finals; I haven’t in the past six years – the last exam in the class is the last day of class (because I usually take off for the UK asap following the end of term.) It’s on the syllabus; I remind the students repeatedly.
Yet in the week following the last day of class, I get emails from panicked students asking to know when the final is. I’ve been in England the past week or so now, and have had a couple of them so far.
As for the dreams – I’ve never dreamt that I’ve missed an exam, or can’t find a classroom, or any of that; mine tend to be that it’s the first day of term, and my chairman has decided that I’d be best suited to teach a calculus class. In real life, I never took a maths higher than Algebra, and I teach ancient history and music history; in the dream, when I tell my chairman this, he just chuckles as if I’m acting falsely modest. Strange stuff.
On the day of an exam, I slept late, and woke up late; it was 15 minutes past the paper. I grabbed a cab to the exam hall and managed to make it before the one hour mark; after an hour they won’t let anyone into the hall anymore.
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html
I couldn’t let a thread like this pass without a plug for Mark Twain’s “The Awful German Language”
My favorite quote from it "In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.”
I had a similar thing happen in my college econ class. I just about never went to the lectures, just came in for the first day and the two midterms. I was a little shaky on some of the material in the book after the second midterm so I went to the Tuesday review session before the Thursday exam.
Turns out the prof had given the class the option to have the test on Tuesday during the last day of class the week before. If I hadn’t showed up for review I would have missed the test.
I got a B.
Something similar happened to me in college. I was quite the goof-off my freshman year of college and often didn’t bother to go to class. I didn’t keep up with the reading either. One day I was idly contemplating whether to go to a poli sci class and thought “what the heck, haven’t been in a while, I’ll go.”
As our astute Dopers will have already guessed, I walked in to class to discover there was a mid-term exam. I had not read the material for it, either. However, out of curiosity I had recently done some other reading not on the syllabus but related to the exam. Anyway I didn’t have much of a choice - I picked up my pen and started writing.
I got a B, pissing off two girls on my dormitory hallway who had clearly studied madly and also got B’s …
“German is not a language, it is a throat disease.” - George Bernard Shaw (attributed)
Hey, calm down 
I was 45 minutes late to a mid-term this term due to President Obama being in town and the trains and freeways being shut down/delayed, making it impossible for me to get to campus on time and ended up with 45 min. to do my exam and I still did fine (A).
Sounds like you feel you did fine except for the bone-head error due to stress. (mine was missing a true/false question in which I marked it true that John FORD directed The Maltese Falcon :smack: :D…just a brain-fart error which didn’t matter given the rest of my performance).
But yeah, what a nightmare, huh? OMG! my exam is TODAY! :eek: I had one of those moments recently during my finals week when my daughter said, “Oh, it’s Thursday” and I freaked out and said, “NO, NOOOOOOO, it’s Wednesday! It HAS to be Wednesday!” thinking I had missed a final. Of course, it WAS Wednesday, but I almost had a heart attack, lol.
At least you got there with SOME time to spare and didn’t miss it altogether.
And it sounds an awful lot like English, if you really hear it as it is, past the native speaker’s bias. All those abrupt sounds and sharp consonants. Neither has the melodic flow of say, Hawaiian or even French. Great quotation, thanks.
Nahhh. If you make a go at keeping yourself to good old Anglo-Saxon words, it has a flow all its own in spite of the roughness of some of the letters. But to be fair, it does sound rough when there are sudden intrusions of French verbiage which provide a shocking contrast.
Yeah, except when you have a dozen or two OTHER important appointments (including final papers, projects, jobs, bills due/paperwork pending, kids, elderly parents with Drs appointments you must drive them to, car repairs, etc…etc…) as is the case for many students (not all of us are 19 yr olds with no other responsibilities who live on campus).
And besides, the stress of finals week can mess with your head (even some professors screw up under the load of work and pressure involved).
It happens. This last term was easy for me overall, but the one before this…OMG, I had a list of about 15 crucial things to get done or prepare for/keep track of during that last week or so, and like to went MAD both getting them done and freaking out over forgetting any of them! (I kept the list in plain sight and updated it daily).
So cut us some slack…you sit in an office and SCHEDULE our exams. We actually have to prepare for them, get to them, do them, and fit them into the rest of our lives.
Oh, I agree it has a lovely flow, just that it is rather similar, if heard simply as a series of sounds, to German (which also has its own lovely flow, but which is nothing like some of the more melodic languages to the unbaised ear…or perhaps “melodic” is the wrong term…it has a different melody, let’s say). Some languages, including the ones I mentioned, make more use of vowel sounds and more fluid transitions between words, whereas English and German tend to be relatively more abrupt and use more hard consonants.
I am a student of French, native English speaker. I have nothing against either English or German of course, just an observastion.
This also happened to me, except it was a freshman programming class. I have been programming for many years before that, so all of the materials were completely trivial to me. Between being a freshman and having fallen in love with a girl for the first time, I rarely went to that class. One day I just happened to feel like going, just to find out what’s going on, and, Surprise! that just happened to be the day of the mid-term. I did pretty well and got an A. I went to class a bit more often after that close call, though.