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Worst Educational Experiences

Many of us have had a bad academic experience along the way to obtaining a degree, whether in high school or at university. I once, for example, had a professor who was obsessed with preventing cheating on his exams, even if it meant giving a nice big fat advantage to 30 or 40 percent of the students taking them. He even did research on how to prevent cheating and talked about it while students were taking the exam. The class numbered into the hundreds, and filled the largest auditorium on campus. Normally there were 20 or 30 people who actually showed up to this professor’s lectures (he put the class notes online), but for exams there was not an empty seat in the largest auditorium on campus.

On exam day, everyone was there a little early for some last-minute reviewing. When the hour started, he proceeded to kick everyone out of the auditorium fire-drill style, something that itself took five to ten minutes. Then, after lining up all the way out of the building, one by one we were randomly assigned to seats. He cited a study he read that found students were most likely to cheat off friends sitting next to them during the exam.

And his strategy worked in that sense, no one sat anywhere near the person in front or behind them in line. But for those of us now waiting, outside, at the end of his enormous line, this meant forty minutes of queuing up just to get the damned test. Meanwhile the students towards the front of the line had the luxury of taking their time in a nice, quiet room. The reason I say quiet is because it was an open book/open note test. The notes and text books couldn’t really help you; these were all applied knowledge questions. You had to know the material and then use reasoning to find the answer. However, the four hundred or so kids who never went to class didn’t seem to catch on to this cruel truth. It turns out that four hundred people frantically trying to look up answers and shuffling papers, combined with the constant stream of students being supervised to their seat, is pretty loud.

When asked later, the Prof cited some other educational study that contended students who have only forty minutes do just as well statistically as students who have 120 minutes to complete open book exams. This might have been true, but I wonder if that study controlled for the constant freaking noise and irritation his stupid examination procedure caused between those two groups. I’m guessing not, because the curve on the first exam was huge, and for the next exam he switched to using multiple test forms to combat cheating.

-Luke

Send your own outrageous, frustrating, or unbelievable academic experiences to luke@uprodigy.com and we’ll post the best ones here.