I’ve always been intrigued by the following story and I was hoping someone, maybe a Harvard grad or something, would provide some further info:
It’s the final exam in a philosophy class. The exam question is simpy one word: “Why?”. Whle the rest of the class begins scribbling away on their 50 page answers, one student writes a brief something and hands in his paper after about 30 seconds. Students’s answer: “Why not?” Proffesor givs him an A plus.
This is a pretty well-known story, so I apologize if it’s been answered here before. I couldn’t find it in the archives of this place…
Yeah, that’s a pretty classic story. They were probably telling that one at Heidelberg and the Sorbonne back around 1483.
From the title, I was hoping for something more site-specific, like how at midnight on Walpurgis Night, if a virgin passes by, the statue of John Harvard leaps down off its pedestal and does the frug.
I had always heard a variation of that (told as a joke):
The final exam for the philosophy class basically told you if you would pass or fail. Students were of course nervous and studied long and hard.
The exam was passed out, there was only one question on it: “What is courage?”
Students spent pages scribbling various theories and quotes from philosophers, but one student turned in a paper after only a minute! The professor read his answer. The only words on the paper were: “THIS IS”.
The “what is courage” one is also listed on the Snopes reference given above.
I heard a variation on this about 12 years ago - same setting, Philosophy exam. Question was, “Is this a question?” Student’s answer: “Yes, if this is an answer.”
…And then there is the story of the student in the enormous class who continued writing his final essay after time was called. Once good and complete, the student nonchalantly walked up to the sprawling pile of blue books, and the professor.
“I’m going to fail you for not completing your essay when time was called.”
The student peered at the professor and struck a defiant pose. “Do you know who I am?”
“No,” said the professor, “and furthermore I don’t care.”
“Good,” said the student, and with that he slid his essay into the center of the pile and ran from the room.
As far as test-taking legends go, here’s a story I have always taken to be at least partly true, because I knew so many fellow students who suffered through it. Somewhere around 1987 or 1988 at Virginia Tech, Civil War History Professor James I. Robertson subjected several 450-person classes to a statistical study wherein his multiple-choice Scantron tests were so diabolically misleading and convoluted that the curve was awarding passing grades to students who scored below 20%.
Several engineering students I knew who were taking the course as an elective claim they got a bright idea, walked in to the final exam and “skied” the test by picking one letter and answering only that letter for every question. They all passed the course, and at least one of the guys I knew claimed he broke the curve wide open.
I’m pretty sure the test was limited to six distractors per question, which given an even distribution of correct answers would have netted a final score of about 17%, which might well have been a passing grade. If those malevolent Statistics people had given an undue weight to one of the six possible answers, my accquaintence’s claim that he broke the curve might also be true if he had managed to randomly select the “magic column.”
