What Did You Get for Question Five?


Wherein Our Heroine Examines Something She Hates.
As I have mentioned before, Our Hero is getting his master's degree. Here at Our Heroine's Job-Hunting Headquarters, we are very proud of him. He got an A on his first paper for one class and has taken his first midterm for another.

All of this going-to-school stuff has reminded me of some of the nightmare scenarios that are inherent in becoming a student again. My least favorite would be the post-exam deconstructionist critique, otherwise known as, "What did you get for question five?"

You know the scene: you've just exited an exam room, visions of blue book pages are still flipping before your eyes like those page-a-day calendar montages in a 1930's film. You either feel:

a.) Elated - you studied all the right things;
b.) Panicked - you studied all the wrong things;
c.) Wary - the professor's seemingly straightforward questions might have actually been trick ones; or
d.) Dazed - it's over, that's all you can say about it. You're one step away from shambling across to the Dean's office and moaning, "Brrraiiinnnnnsssss...." (Need we note that this is the most likely scenario?)

It is at this point when some hyperactive, overachieving, type-AAA-double-plus-ungood fiend comes up to you and says, "What did you get for question five?" During my last academic experience, it seemed that this question invariably came from a certain person who always claimed to be "in the weeds." He regularly reported that he was so far behind he could see himself coming. Ha. He used this tactic to lower expectations, the better to dazzle all when he made law review and graduated cum laude. Why he always chose to ask me what I got for question five, I will never know - just as he will never know how close I was to ripping his arm off and beating him with it whenever he asked me this asinine question.

Let's face it: I could never even remember what question five was. And if I did there was no good to be gained by realizing, ten minutes after I turned it in, that I had written the exam in such a way that my answers not only exposed me for an intellectual fraud, but would be read out loud in the next faculty meeting, the better to convulse the professor's peers in hilarity. The exam is over. The semester is over. What good is it to stand in the foyer and obsess over something you can do nothing about?

With the benefit of hindsight, I would have taken the following approach. Before handing in the exam, I would carefully have taken note of the number of the last question. Then I'd hand in my exam. When I was asked the inevitable question, I would say, "Oh, man - yeah. Question five. But what about question seventeen?"

Question sixteen would have been the last question on the exam.

Posted: Tuesday - October 26, 2004 at 07:46 AM         | |

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