One of the profs here, on a day when most of the class was absent (the last day before Thanksgiving break, or some such), told all of the students there present what her favorite color was, and also told them that it would be on the final. It was.
I’m trying to find a copy of the Systems Analyst Test that was going around in the 70s. I think it appeared in Byte Magazine, along with other publications. It included questions of the nature: ‘Describe human thought. Compare to other forms of thought’.
Anybody out there old enough and geeky enough to remember that?
Calculus is:
a. a kidney stone
b. a branch of mathematics that deals with limits and the differentiation and integration of functions of one or more variables
c. a type of spider
d. all of the above
Wait, textbooks have titles? Usually they just have authors, and if the same author wrote multiple books, the color of the cover. Like, “Look it up in Jackson”, or “Do you have a copy of Schutz’s green book?”.
I had a philosophy final quite like this, but I spent the entire two-hour exam period writing my answer in the form of a play. An absurdist (“Hi, Godot!”)-meets-The Bard-meets-medieval morality play. Starring Davy Hume, Jerry Bentham, and “One (1) Goose, Blue.”
Prof was amused by the details, like the stage directions (“Exeunt Stage Left amidst the peal of broken crockery”) and bios of the actors. And, as you can tell, I’m still proud of it.
Got a chance to study with Karl Popper based on that final alone!
(But I thought Madison, WI sounded like more fun than a remote English village. I was right).
These tests peeve me in their concept, because who’s to say the final “Ignore everything above” instruction should take priority over all the other conflicting instructions? Clearly, it’s not possible to act in accordance with all the provided instructions; accordingly, I take it to be my prerogative to choose which subset (perhaps the largest possible…) to follow. Perhaps it’s the last step I should ignore because of all the previous steps telling me to do something else, rather than the reverse.
Of course, if it actually matters that the teacher consider my actions correct, I’ll do whatever’s easiest to reach that goal, usually by just taking the “Ignore everything else” path and avoiding self-righteous lectures on the priority ambiguities. But it still peeves me…
Yes (hence “if it actually matters that the teacher consider my actions correct”, the qualification being because it usually doesn’t). I’m just saying, I find the concept of the joke slightly peeving in its mistakenly smug “Ha! Fooled you”. It doesn’t keep me up at nights or anything.
