My academic worst nightmare, come to life

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I get really paranoid during the last week of school for several reasons. Most of my professors specify the maximum number of classes you can miss on the syllabus - usually three - without affecting your grade. Because I have a hellish commute and I am lazy as all get out, I strive to miss the maximum number of lectures for each class, especially if it’s an 8:30 class. Then during the last week of school, I become majorly paranoid about my alarm not going off one day and missing another class (this is the price I pay for my desire to sleep in every day of my life).

I also had nine papers to write, and after most of them were done and turned in (all on the same freaking day), I was paranoid about having forgotten one. But all is well so far (I still have two more to write).

22

Ever have that dream where you show up to class and everyone is in the middle of taking a major exam that you didn’t know about? That happened to me. Twice. The second time it happened, I decided to show up for the last twenty minutes of a ninety minute class, and found the lecture hall half-empty and everyone busy filling in ScanTron sheets. I still finished it with time to spare. That was an embarassingly easy class. The first time it happened, it was a statistics midterm, and I ended up turning in a blank exam, because I didn’t have any notes and couldn’t solve a single equation. Only class I ever flunked.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. On three seperate occasions, I got report cards for classes I never signed up for. Good lord, that was annoying. I had a serious hate-on for the administration at my college by the time I was through. They still haven’t sent me my diploma, although they haven’t been shy about sending letters drumming me for donations.

Then there was the time I took a header into a mudpuddle fifteen minutes before I had to give a speech in my public speaking class. That was good, too.

23

That’s fucking insane.

I mean, the whole switcheroo thing is insane, but why in the hell can’t a class be cross-classified? At the very least, there should have been some sort of Grandfather Clause…

24

I’m sorry, I can’t stop thinking about Mr. Hand’s post (I dunno, it’s like literary racism to me, or something…).

I wonder if the school did it so that graduating students would be forced to shell out more money to complete their degrees?

25

My worst academic nightmare came true Saturday.

I was cramming to write a paper I was to give to my professor on Sunday. Suddenly, a book leaped off my shelf and landed on a cup of tea, which decided to spill in the direction of my laptop. I had just been thinking that I really ought to backup up my files. I lost the work I had done as well as the use of my computer for the rest of the night. The files have since been restored, but it’s too late to write the paper because it was meant for a conference that starts tomorrow, and I’ve been taking exams for the past couple days. I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me.

26

I was in NROTC and Civil Engineering, and some of the courses I needed to take for CE conflicted with the labs/drills for NROTC. No problem, an independent study would do the trick! My school had a Soil Mechanics lab that had not been operating for 20 years, so I took second semester senior year, ordered parts, established lab manuals, did repeatability studies, and got the practice to obtain and prepare samples, and conduct triaxial compression testing for various grades of soil and pressures. I was rockin! The prof, during this time, was taking the semester to teach in Poland, his homeland, incommunicado (e-mail did not exist for me then). I take my exams, turn in my paper and lab manual, and went to Myrtle Beach for the week before graduation! The afternoon after graduation I was to be commissioned as a 2ndLt in the Marines, with the rest of my NROTC (Marine Option) Class. Big weekend.

I get back from the beach, like the DAY before graduation, and I get a call from the prof that he wanted to see me. He was giving me an <b>Incomplete!</b> What. The. FUCK??? Seems he wanted test RESULTS, not test METHODS. Well, duh, I needed to rebuild the lab before I could do ANYTHING, and there were NO lab manuals, and I had done all the work required for EITHER paper, but he was not swayed. I told him I would take a C-, AND stay after graduation and essentially re-write the damned paper. Uh-uh. INCOMPLETE, and too late to do anything about it. I was livid.

I walked through the big graduation ceremony, but skipped the small one for Engineering. I watch Commissioning in a suit, but stood with the group for the class photo. 11 guys in Dress Blues. One in white trousers and a light blue blazer. Sucked on very many levels. My family was all in town, including Great Aunts and shit. My Dad, the retired Marine LtCol, to see his oldest son earn his commission in the Marines. Ad nauseum.

I moved in with my sister, who lived just off campus, and spent 15 hours a day back in the damned lab. Re-writing a monster paper, and conducting the odd triaxial tests to fill in some data voids, and finished the semester-long study in about two and a half weeks. The bastard gave my like a C on it, but I rushed around to the Dean (a good guy) and the Registrar to get that “I” changed, then took the paperwork to the ROTC Unit, and had a personal commissioning ceremony, and still made it to Quantico before my TBS class was scheduled to start.

UncleBill
Class of 88.25

27

This thread is giving me the chills. I am constantly in fear of screwing up my college career.

Anyways, I do not have a scary academic story yet, but I do have one in the making.

I am an Aerospace major at MTSU. I am in a class right now where I have three weeks to perform a major overhaul of a reciprocating aircraft engine. The engine I was assigned is one that is run on a test stand for other classes. The bad thing is, if this engine fails after my overhaul, but before the next guy overhauls it in some future class, I will fail THIS class. Even if it blows up a year from now, and I already have my A.

I will be a nervous wreck everytime I hear that thing start from now on.

28

That happened to me last Friday.

I hadn’t been to my Engineering Design with Polymers lecture for about a week and a half before the last day of the semester; it’s fairly early in the morning and the lectures are also available on video, so it’s ordinarily not a big deal. Since the university assigned a normal two-hour exam period, I came to what I assumed was a review class.

It was strangely quiet as I sat down, and a small packet of papers labeled “Exam 2” landed in front of me.

Even without studying, the exam was easy; it was open book and open note, and only took me about 30 minutes to finish. So I turned it in, and saw a growing stack of completed problem sets. Yep, apparently I’d missed a homework assignment as well.

That afternoon, I went up to my professor’s office to pick up the assignment; he’s very flexible about these things, so I expected (correctly) that it would be hassle-free.

What I didn’t expect was sticking around for half an hour and just talking polymers. One thing led to another, and the conversation turned from me asking unanswered questions about class material to him telling me about undergraduate research opportunities.

When all the proverbial dust had settled, I had my late homework assignment in hand (due the following Monday)… and a summer research job. :smiley:

29

Four midterms…each worth the same 200 points, for a total score of 800…curve is 78% B (won’t bother about A), so about 620-630 points are needed.

Midterm 1: 177
Midterm 2: 155
Midterm 3: 160

That’s about A, B, and either B or B+ depending on how the teacher assigns the “+”. Also, I need about 130 to get a B on the class. Thats a pretty low C or high D…and to get a C+, I could still get a D in that test.

My final grade for the class as it appears on my records? C.
My professor? In Yucatán, will come back next week.
Are the grades for the last midterm posted? Nope…not posted in any place.
Is this a nightmare? Yes, and it came true.

30

Ugh, I’m still trying to sort out a similar thing right now. My phonetics professor told us at the beginning of the quarter that she “doesn’t do make-ups.” So, back in April I was feeling sick, and figured I’d skip class and sleep, especially since everything we were discussing was review.

Unfortunately, I’d completely forgotten that we had a test that day (and would probably have dragged myself to class if I’d remembered). But I didn’t get too upset, because she also has a “drop the lowest grade” policy. Great. Well, (you can see where this is going…) last week I was exhuasted, and decided to take a nap in the morning, before this 12:30 class, when we had another test, hoping to not fall asleep during it.

Of course, I wake up at 4:30, and find that my alarm, set for 12:00, was still on! (One of my roommates says he heard it go off and then stop - I’m getting far too skilled at this stuff :eek: ) I tried to talk to her about it, but it still looks like my grade now has a 0 as part of my test averaege. Argh!

31

Okay, let’s say that you have one more exam left in your college career and it’s about the later middle ages. Let’s also say that you are a journalism major and you took it because it not only looked interesting, it also filled a requirement. But it turned out to be a little more intense than you expected and you really had to bust your hump to keep up. And then let’s say you had a week to go over the (surprisingly specific) study questions but you forgot to do so until, say, right now. And the big essay exam is at 8:00.

Yeah.

32

I wrote a paper which extensivly quoted Lawrence Lessig. The problem was, for some strange reason, I refered to him as “Larry Lessig” throughout the paper. My teacher wrote a stern note about “do not use informal names in an academic paper!!!”. What must he have been thinking about me?

Being a film major is nothing but a giant academic nightmare.

Or else the time that we were asked to turn our work in on VHS. I figured that I could just print out a VHS copy, show it in class, and skip making a digital video copy alltogether. I printed my VHS copy. Knowing that our VHS decks can be a bit sketchy, I tested in on several decks. I insisted on showing my piece first in class, knowing that something would probably go wrong. It did. It wouldn’t play.

I call my boyfriend and have him rush the hard drive with the project on it to class. I have to break into the editing suites because I didn’t have a key to access them during finals week. Then, I stupidly forget how to work the digital video decks (specifically, I forgot to that you have to press “record” while the machine is paused in order for it to record). I was holed up in an editing suite for most of the class trying to figure out how to get the thing to record. I finally got a print made and managed to show my piece in the last five minutes of class.

While I was editing the rough cut of that piece, my hard drive stopped working, then when it did work, the computer wouldn’t recognize my hard drive. Then when it did recognize my hard drive, it crashed, and then when it stopped crashing, it kept dropping frames. I thought that six hours was going to be plenty of time to do some last minute editing and print to tape. It took me six hours just to get set up!

At least we have it better than the bad old pre-digital days, when film student shot their film and sent them off to development, only to discover far too late that their lighting was wrong and everything is pure black or pure white, or their film accidently got exposed, or the stock can only be developed in Sweden, or the developers disapproved of the content and didn’t include the parts they didn’t like, or any number of disasters that can happen to film. Probably a full quarter of film students fail their projects because of terrible circumstances like that.

My biggest fear is that teachers are secretly circulating roll sheets without me knowing.

33

While this isn’t as bad as some of the horror stories up here, I’ll share anyway, because I’m a nice guy like that.
(and a blowhard, and creeping up on 100 posts, but don’t think about that)

My anthro final last year had a study session on the night before the final. I didn’t attend, since I live half an hour away and didn’t want to waste my time loitering around on campus when I could easily be loitering and studying at home, and it was an easy class anyway.

Day of the final: I hike down to the room ten minutes early, and sit in the front row (more legroom - I tend to twitch when I write fast). As the room fills up, I don’t recognize anybody. Finally, two minutes before the test begins, an instructor I’d never seen before walks in and proclaims that he had switched rooms with the class that was supposed to be there, everybody who had been to the review last night was told, and that my final was halfway across campus. I had to bolt up the stairs to the back of the room to the exit in front of hundreds of people who apparently knew where their final was. The only consolation was the few other people who I had seen scurrying out ahead of me - we avoided each other’s faces as we jogged to where our final was being held, and glared lasers at our prof when we took our test papers.

34

The same thing happened to me, except in my case the professor actually did tell the class about the changed date for the final… on the one day I didn’t show up for class. So on the original final date I spent the morning studying then went to class, and of course nobody was there. I thought I was going crazy, that I was at the wrong building, that the final was cancelled (it was raining). I never took the final. When I got my grade for the class, I was surprised to find that I got an A on both midterms and the final. I guess that since I got such high scores on the midterms, they thought they must have lost my final and felt embarassed. In conclusion, sometimes if you make a mistake its better to just ignore it and hope it goes away!

35

I missed my last final exam of college. In my last semester, one of my classes ended in the middle of the semester, another was a thesis class, so I only had three finals to take during the two-week exam period. The first two were on the first and third days of the exam period. The last was on the very last day of finals (at Thursday), or so I thought.

I had an extremely strong A in this class and all the exams had been easy. My professor kept saying the final would be a lot harder, but I didn’t believe her. So on Wednesday night I’m out at a bar getting drunk. A guy in my Sociology class comes up and asks me what I thought of the exam. I just laughed because I thought he was messing with me. As the evening progressed, two more classmates came up to me and asked me why I wasn’t there for the final. Oh, crap. Since I was graduating no matter what I got on the exam, I wasn’t as freaked out as I probably should have been.

The next morning realized how stupid I had been, and I ran across campus to my professor’s office. When she opened the door and saw me she started laughing. “I was wondering where you were” she said. She found a conference room for me and let me take the test once I assured her I hadn’t discussed the substance of the test with anyone (which was true). I sat down to take the exam and it was really, really hard. Since I hadn’t studied at all (a brilliant exam strategy) I knew I wouldn’t do well at all. So I calculated what I would get if I took a 0 on the exam. I would get a C which wasn’t great, but at least I wouldn’t waste two hours of my time to get a crappy grade.

About 15 minutes later I knocked on my professor’s door and told her that I wasn’t prepared and I’d just take a 0. I’ll never forget the look on her face. The really cool thing is that she ended up giving me the A I had going into the exam. How cool is that?

36

I walked into a final once, on time, calm, relaxed, then looked at the first set of questions and thought "Hmm, this material looks familiar but I don’t remember reviewing this. Then I looked at the exam cover sheet and realized that this was DESC243, not DESC244. AAAGH! A quick run down to the lobby and the posted schedules and I managed to find my real exam, only 10 minutes late. The professor was waiting outside for me because I was the only student that actually asked questions during the course and I guess I stood out. Nice guy.

37

I once had three finals in one day, all right after each other. Big deal, right? Well, it just so happened that one of the finals was for an independent study, and it wasn’t as much a test as a final review with the professor. We’d scheduled it for the one-hour lunch break between my morning and afternoon finals a week or so earlier (I figured as long as I was on campus, might as well get it all done at once). Still no big deal.

Well, two days before those finals, in my programming class final, the instructor tells us that since he’s graduating, he will be leaving campus forever at 1:00 p.m. in (of course) two days. And he will only be available to discuss anything about the class during that lunch break (12-1). I figure, no problem, I shouldn’t need to see him about anything. He also mentions that the third midterm grades have been posted.

I go to check my midterm grade (you can see where this is going) and it’s an F. Something must be wrong, I think. After all, it was a fairly easy in-lab midterm – my programs all worked, and I couldn’t have lost that many points on technique. So I check the archive that I’d submitted, and half the files are gone. Most of the rest are just corrupted (obviously so). So I e-mail the instructor about the problem, and explain that I have to be at this other review during his only office hour. His response? “There may be a problem, but you’ll have to come to my office then.” No other options.

I rush through the review and then run across campus to catch the guy. It’s 12:55. The office is dark – he’s left campus forever. I not only failed the class (midterms were a big part of the grade) but I was a few minutes late to my third final as well, darn it!. I was able to convince the department to let me take the course over ‘for free’ (i.e. without it reflecting negatively on my transcript) and to take courses that had it as a prereq. That guy’s the only instructor I ever really hated (even before the final I disliked him).

That may be balanced by the time I was 20 minutes late for a final, but due to a bomb threat, ended up having the same amount of time as everyone else (took them that long to set up an alternate location).

minor note:

Sorry to re-hash this, but I was friends with a girl whose brother killed himself while in college after failing some classes. While it’s clear it was hyperbole, the comment did strike me as a little jarring (not just because of my experience, but because it’s not that far from what some people have actually done.)

38

My true academic nightmare involved my friend’s thesis. A friend of mine left grad school with a master’s degree, and she left town–indeed, left the country–before she’d finished up all the paperwork and stuff, and she begged me to help her take care of everything. Yeah, okay, what are friends for?

Listen, children . . . if anyone asks you to do such a thing, say no. Say it loudly, and without apology. Then turn and run.

So I did all the annoying crap. I took a draft to the Evil Thesis Lady who checks the format. (I’m not being insulting when I call her The Evil Thesis Lady. Everyone calls her that. I think it’s her official title.) The Evil Thesis Lady pointed out some trivial formatting errors, but seemed (ah, seemed) to be saying that the were not very important. What I thought she meant was, fix them if it’s easy, and if it’s not, don’t worry about it. So I tried to fix them, and found it was nearly impossible with the software my friend was using, so, after emailing my friend and explaining that I didn’t know how to fix the problem, and finding out that she didn’t know how to either, and neither did anyone else around the department who uses the same software, I gave up. I printed out a final copy, made ten (ten!) copies on archival paper, lugged them to the bindery, realized when I got there that I had forgotten the Grant of Degree form that has to be bound into the Very Official Copy for the University, so I drove back to my office and got the form, and then took it back to the bindery, and, whew, we were all set. Two weeks later, the theses were bound. Yippee! I drove back to the bindery and picked up the ten bound copies. I lugged seven bound copies to the post office and mailed them to my friend. I returned to campus and placed one bound copy in the deparment reading room, as was customary.

Then I triumphantly returned to The Evil Thesis Lady with the two copies for the University. (What thehell do they do with them in this day and age?) She noted that the formatting problems weren’t fixed. I said that I thought she’d said that they weren’t important. Well, when she said they weren’t important what she meant was that they weren’t important compared to other boneheaded formatting mistakes that the other sniveling students who darken her doorway are wont to make, but they were grounds for refusal of the thesis. I became very pale and tried to explain yet again that this wasn’t my thesis, that I was trying to handle this for someone who was on another contient and that I had tried to fix it and couldn’t, and I already had everything bound and everything, and . . . and . . . luckily, she relented.

The Evil Thesis Lady then looked at the Very Offical Copy that has the Grant of Degree form bound into it as the front page, and she notified me that there was an error in the form. In fact, it turned out to be my fault because my dear friend had left me to do all the damn paperwork. As my heart hammered and my palms grew clammy, she informed me that I would have to fill out a new form, correctly this time, and get the signatures of my friend’s committe members (did I mention that one of them was in South America?) and the thesis would have to be rebound with the correct paperwork. (Let’s recap, shall we? Fill out the form, which has to be done with a manual typewriter, which I am barely able to operate. God forbid that I should make another mistake. Secure the signatures of four persons, three of whom are on the far corners on the campus, one of whom is in South America. Make two more copies of the thesis on archival paper–and this time the formatting must be fixed, which will take God knows how long. Take the thesis and the form to the bindery. Return two weeks later. Take the bound thesis to the Evil Thesis Lady, and hope to God she doesn’t find anything else wrong. . . )

I bawled. I bawled, right there in the Evil Thesis Lady’s office.

I think that the Evil Thesis Lady makes a lot of people cry, because she was completely unruffled, and just handed me a tissue.

I finally negotiated her down to cutting out the form in the bound copy and replacing it with the new form.

After getting said person’s permission by email, I had another professor forge the signature of the committe member who was in South America.
Please do not tell the Evil Thesis Lady. For months afterwards, I’d wake up sweating at 3 AM wondering what would happen if she discovered the forgery . . . or if, upon reviewing her files, she decides that she was too nice about the formatting thing and I have to redo it after all.

Gahhhh . . . And this year I’m going to have to take care of my own thesis. shiver

39

This past fall, I got to take an exam on Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJT’s) the monday after I was informed that I was no longer needed at the place I had worked for the past 4 years. And my worst nightmare happened, I sat down to take the test, and promptly forget everything I knew about BJT’s. I didn’t answer a single problem. I made mistakes that a 1st year engineering student wouldn’t have, it was embarassing to put it mildly.