My academic worst nightmare, come to life

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

What was your worst nightmare in college? Showing up to class naked? Discovering during finals week that a class you didn’t know you signed up for is now expecting you to take your final? Or was it more like going to a really shitty class day after day and then missing that all-important final worth 25% of your total grade?

My friends, I have just lived my own worst nightmare.

How, you ask, did you accomplish that, Little Bird? You wrote down the date and time of your final on the first day of class. You checked it with the syllabus the prof handed out many times; just to make sure you had it right. You showed up to every class except one about a month ago. You knew it was worth a quarter of your grade, so you made sure you were (mostly) all prepared for it! The only way you could have missed this final was if your prof decided to change the date on the web page syllabus, which must have been hidden in the recesses of the site, not then announce the change to his class in any way shape or form.

What kind of man would do such a thing? An evil, twisted demon whose idea of a good time is roasting his students on a spit while they scream and writhe in agony?

Or perhaps just a man so idiotic that when he is lecturing on the overhead, he stands directly in front of the lens so all anyone can make out on the screen is a giant, shiny, bald head with a tiny, oily ponytail in the back? A man who, instead of writing something relevant like a measure of scale, writes the words “Rough Sketch” under his rough sketches. A man who holds up an 8 ½ by 11 piece of paper in front of a 150-person lecture-hall and says “I know you can’t see what’s on this paper because it’s too small, but I want to show it to you anyway.” A man who is teaching his last semester of any class ever and has just stopped caring.

Perhaps this is the kind of waste of skin that would change the date of his final and somehow manage not to tell anyone. Perhaps he would assume that, even though he handed out a hard copy at the start of the semester, his class would check his online syllabus daily, just to see if he had changed anything. (if they are going to do this, professors typically tell you that at some point)

My friend who is in the class with me actually found out that the date had changed (thanks for the heads-up, dipshit) and went to the final. He says there were a lot fewer people there than should have been. Looks like I’m not alone in my mistake. Hopefully the prof will be flooded with emails like the one I wrote him and give us a makeup or something. Oh well, I learned absolutely nothing in this class. Nothing. Perhaps this is fate’s way of saying “Hey, you are in college to learn, right? Well, next semester you will learn what this class was supposed to teach you. Hahahahaha!!!” At least it will be a new prof next semester, so maybe I will learn a thing or two. Hope* Hope*

Do any of you guys have an “I lived my own worst nightmare” stories to tell? Share, by all means!

2

Oh. My. God.

I’ve had terrible dreams about that sort of thing. Surely there’s someone you could talk to… dean? provost? That’s so beyond unethical…

I feel for you, I really do. The worst that really happened to me that I can think of was almost sleeping through an early morning final my freshman year, but my roommate (literally) dragged me out of bed, so it was okay.

3

I once slept through a final.
Then, after the prof (bless his sainted soul) allowed me at the last minute to take the final with another of his classes, my work (Starbucks) wouldn’t release me (even though we were overstaffed on shift and I was covering for a no-show as a favour) until the proctored period was half over. I still got an A, though, so perhaps I work best in a panic.

My mother still has nightmares that she’s enrolled in a class, missed a whole semester’s attendance and has to make it all up in the final week. Although, she’s never actually had to do it. I have though. I’m just a crappy student allround.

4

I mean, I overslept and missed a final.
I’m pretty sure I’ve never slept through a final. Pretty sure.

5

I was in grad school. Showed up for my final exam in History of the English Language and… no one was there.

I flipped, of course. Ran down to professor’s office; no one there. Began to sweat; what was going on? I checked the syllabus–yep, 8 a.m., so where was everyone?

Then I checked the syllabus again. Glory be to the Almighty, I was a day early! Not late, but early!

I hardly need to tell you how careful I was to arrive punctually the following day, or how relieved I was when everyone was there. I didn’t tell anyone about showing up a day early, though.

Well, until now, that is.

6

A professor of mine once told me that a class syllabus has been ruled as a legally binding document in some court decision or other. If the date of the exam is on the syllabus and you didn’t have a reasonable opportunity to know it was changed (and unless daily checking of the website is mandatory, you didn’t), then you ought to have the right to take the exam- and if the professor disagrees, you should take the matter up with his superiors.

7

I would complain to the administration.

You paid for that class. And no matter what his future held, he was being paid to instruct the class and he didn’t fulfill his side of the bargain.

8

I’m with the “Go Bitch and Moan” group. Randomly rescheduling the final is not cool. Find a dean and bend their ear. Drop a line to the provost. If you can hunt up the phone number of one of the trustees do so. (Trustees make things happen that you would not believe.)

9

If I found out that the prof had moved the final earlier causing me to miss it, I’d be tempted to say, “Tough noogies, teach. You’ll just have to give me a grade on what I’ve done so far.”

If he disagreed with that, the phone lines to Admin would melt.

10

Well, you guys can stop worrying; I got to makeup the sucka. The prof was so accommodating that I think he knew he screwed up big time. I’ll keep you posted on my final grade. :slight_smile:

Now my only worry is: do I tell my mom and dad?

BTW–keep the personal nightmares coming! Good times!

11

Oh crap. That’s suicide-contemplation horrible. I’m glad you were able to take a makeup, though.

I’ve never missed a final. I’m paranoid about checking and double-checking deadlines that way. For the last few months I was in college and law school I was paranoid that I had forgotten to do something important like a paper or a project. For a few weeks each time I actually lived in fear of getting a phone call from the administration telling me that since I hadn’t completed such-and-such I wouldn’t be graduating. The fear even woke me up in a cold sweat a few times.

12

Yeah, I’ve slept through a final. I also once slept through a makeup test that I desperately needed to pull my grade up, and that one’s the really dumb one: the exam was set for 10 AM the next day, and I was sleepy, so I went to bed at 8 PM so I would be well-rested and rarin’ to go by the next day.

I woke up at 2 PM the following day. No idea why I slept so long.

13

I once got an extension on a paper because the professor wrote in the syllabus that it was due (for example) Thursday, May 17… when May 17 was a Friday (or some such mistake, where the day and date didn’t correspond). At any rate, I chose the latter day (does this make me a saint?–hee hee) to hand in my paper…

I wasn’t trying to cheat the system, but I took full advantage of my idiocy when I was one of about three people who were surprised when everyone else showed up to class with a paper in hand…

Since this idiocy was entirely the professor’s, hell YEAH he should have let you make it up! In fact, I’m with Rysdad… I think you should have gotten off the hook.

14

I nearly missed a final because of hitting the snooze alarm once too many times. But my biggest fear was a train wreck - I lived on the east side of the river, the university was on the west side, and there was a railroad track along the river. If something caused a train to stop in the middle of town, I’d have been stuck. Luckily, it never happened to me.

15

Zappo, I had exactly that happen to me in college. I got a letter in the mail from the english department three weeks before I graduated, saying that one of the classes I had taken my junior year was being retroactively reclassified from an English class that I needed to graduate as an English major to a Czech class. That’s right, a Czech class. It was a class on Milan Kundera, a Czech author who writes in French! I rush down to complain – and am told that my thesis wouldn’t count as an English thesis either, since I was writing about Vladimir Nabokov. Apparently, Lolita and Pale Fire have been retroactively classified as Russian literature – despite the fact that they were written in America, in English. I had to feverishly petition the English Department, the Czech Department, the Slavic Department, the Dean of Students, and the College of Liberal Arts to get this taken care of. I’m in law school now, and I pray that I don’t get a repeat – “we regret to inform you that Criminal Procedure II and Constitutional Law have been reclassified as physical education classes that will not count toward your degree, and so we now notice that you are six credits short of our requirements for receiving a J.D. Best of luck with your endeavors as a non-lawyer.”

16

As a pre-med, I studied very hard for the mid-term exam in organic chemistry, vital for medical school acceptances.

I relied on two clocks, one wind-up and one electrical to get up in time for the early morning exam.

Unfortunately, my wind-up alarm clock stopped and the electricity was off at night for a coupla hours - thus ruining the accuracy of the electrical alam clock.

I showed up after far more than half the test was over, and the instructor did not give me more time.

As a result, my grade suffered and I ended up in a not so good med school from which I dropped out.

17

Not to jump on you, but no it’s not. And I don’t think that’s a very appropriate thing to say.

But that’s just me, and I could be wrong.

18

White Lightning, since the other folks in this thread have not seen fit to take me to task I’ll presume that they understand I was using hyperbole in an attempt to describe my empathy with Little Bird and the feeling of terror and hopelessness that missing a final exam could bring about.

Therefore, my gut feeling is that you are either incredibly thin-skinned or hypersensitive on the subject of suicide. If you lost a friend or loved one in that manner, you have my condolences. I am truly sorry that your friend or loved one felt such despair that they saw no other avenue for relief. However, I don’t think anyone here has taken or would take my comment as a suggestion that anyone anywhere take their own life as a response to missing a final exam.

To summarize: it’s you. And IMO you’re wrong.

FYI, Muffin and Shodan used hyperbolic references to suicide in a similar manner in this thread. You may wish to go over there and chastise them.

Hoping it’ll end here and we won’t get sent to the Pit,

Zappo

19

No problem.

I’m not following the thread you linked, so I didn’t happen to see the statements there that you think I’d object to. I don’t consider myself to have the responsibility of expressing my opinion at every possible opportunity, so it’s not too likely that I’ll go there and chastise anyone as you suggest.

I am neither thin-skinned nor hypersensitive on this issue. I am familiar with the feelings of terror and impotence of accidentally missing a final, and I was aware that you were using the example of suicide as hyperbole. Nonetheless, I feel that it was not a very appropriate thing to say, because I am also aware that for many people this is a very personal, and very serious, matter. I did not take your remark as a suggestion that anyone in this situation should take their own life. I am merely pointing out that, to some people, and in my opinion, suggesting that suicide is a reasonable reaction to something of this nature diminishes those problems for which people do consider something so horrible, and demeans those people. Yes, I know you weren’t saying that it would be reasonable, and you weren’t intending to demean anyone, but I feel that to some people, and in my opinion, the mere suggestion is demeaning.

It’s really not a big deal. I don’t go around yelling at anyone who says something like ‘omigod, if that happened, I’d totally kill myself!’ and as you pointed out I don’t make it a practice to do that on the board either. I just wanted to point out in this instance that your use of it was, in my opinion, inappropriate and totally unnecessary. You could as easily have said ‘that is totally horrible’ and achieved the same effect.

Lastly, I’d like to know why in the world this would have to be taken to the Pit. Was my admission in my original objection that it was merely a matter of my personal feeling and that I was willing to cede to majority opinion (before it had even been expressed) not enough to prevent your feeling personally slighted? Did I insult you in any way? I certainly hope I’ve softened my language in this post enough for you. But I think there is some measure of irony in your assertion that I may be thin-skinned, when your response to my post is to feel as if I was ‘taking you to task’ (I can think of no more effective way to not take someone to task than to begin a post with ‘not to jump on you’ and to close it with ‘I could be wrong’) and suggest that we might have to resort to flaming each other.

But, again, that’s just me. And I could be wrong.

20

I have once slept through a final. Literally-I came to the test, started writing, got stuck on a question, and fell asleep for most of the rest of the exam. Luckily, it was a course I was planning on rewriting the exam for, anyway, so I wasn’t too panicked.

On a lighter note, in my first year at the big, shiny University, I had a Bio lab at 8 AM in second semester. First week of classes, I was all paranoid about finding the proper room in a building I had never been in and had a reputation for getting people lost. So, the night before, I’m really tired, and fall asleep at about 7:30, planning to sleep through to the next morning, and just wake up really early. So, I go to sleep, wake up, and see that the clock says 8:30. I go into a panic, throwing on clothes, and frantically reading the pre-lab while running to class (I lived in rez). It being the middle of winter, I didn’t think it strange that it was still dark outside. So, I get to the building, and find the room. Locked. Lights are off, nobody’s there. Great, I think, first day of labs, and I’ve already screwed up and missed some room change or tour or something. Well, I’m not going to find anybody this way, so I go to head somewhere to sit until I can check back. Hmm-the doors into the physics building are locked-they’re never locked. That’s odd. And now it’s almost 9, shouldn’t there be more people around? Maybe my clock stopped last night and I’m early. So I go to find a clock, yep, it’s almost 9. This can’t be right, so I ask a guy conveniently walking by what time it is. Yep, 9. Suddenly, it dawns on me, and I start laughing. It is indeed 9, but 9 PM! I still don’t know if that guy believes I’m some insano who thinks “9:00” is hilarious…