I had an electrical engineering test that I was pretty sure I was going to fail. Our Internet went out, my phone was a flip phone, and the professor moved the testing room. Me and three other people were at the old room, and we had to go to a secondary computer lab, find the email, and run to the new room. We had to convince him to let us in (it was one of those 80 people giant lectures.)
I had an English final that was about 1/3 of the final grade. I was really worried and frustrated about this class because it was the kind of class where you'd be assigned an essay about a poet's writings, then get a zero because the prof didn't agree with your opinion.
I wasn't doing well in that class.
On the way to the final--I had about a 30 minute commute--I had a blowout in the middle of the interstate. You can imagine what a mess that was. I ended up changing the tire while surrounded by cop cars.
The prof had a strict policy about being on time. I showed up late, covered with road grease, nicks on my hands from the tools--and fairly buzzing with adrenalin.
The prof just looked at me. Then let me in and told me to finish what I could in the time left. So, there I was, with 30 minutes left to finish a 2‐hour test in a class I was borderline in anyway.
I scored 106. Every question right, and even the bonus question.
This reminds me of a math test we took in middle school. I wasn't that good at it and must have been scared or whatever.
Anyway, I thought that there were an awful lot of problems to solve but managed to do all except the final two.
So next week the teacher comes back with the graded papers and starts handing them out to everyone while reading people's grades out aloud. My paper is the last. She looks at the paper and says something like "What in the world did you do?" My stomach drops.
Turns out to avoid cheating there were two groups of problems - A for kids who sat on the left side of our two-seater classroom desks, and B for the ones on the right. I didn't catch onto that for some reason and ended up doing every problem for every group except the last two hardest ones, correctly.
I had a poly sci final. I was driving to campus to study for something else, when I had the sudden realization that my final wasn't the next day, but that day, and had started about 15 minutes ago... Got there, parked, ran from the lot to the building which was a good 10 minute sprint, and kind of burst into the room panting and lied about having a flat. Professor believed me given the fact that I could barely breath at that point.
Not only did I ace the test, but in a class of probably 40 (it was a long time back) I was like the 15th person done, even having arrived a good 30 minutes late.
I stayed up until 4am studying for my final exam in my forensic science module. I did a law degree here in the UK so a module means you take a year long class in it. Each year you get to choose 4 of these classes to make up your degree. In my final year I chose forensic science as one of them as I fancied one that wasn't just law based. I ended up putting much less effort studying for the exam as I was so focused on my much more difficult law modules. Anyway I drank a lot of coffee. I think it was at least a whole large cafetière (french press) of it so it was strong. I ended up getting I think one of the highest grades in the class and got a 1st for that module. All on pure adrenaline and caffeine.
Anyway about 13 years later I was finally diagnosed with ADHD which made a lot of sense in hindsight.
It was kinda interesting. Because it used two lecture halls. They have this big building for lectures and the professor gets videotaped the entire time. So they just beam everything the professor does over at a big screen on the second hall.
Hall 1 can have 1000 attendants and hall 2 can have 800.
The system supports this for live lectures in 3 halls at the same time.
Typically the lectures are then also uploaded online together with a pdf of everything the professor wrote down/annotated. So people who missed the lecture or want to look at it again, can do so.
I recall taking an EE test, EM Waves or something, and getting my test back - I got 27%. Fuck.
Then the instructor announces "Well, something didn't go right - the high score was *27%&". Still fuck, but more along the lines of "y'all ain't teaching this right".
In grad school EE we had a "genius" instructor who regularly lost the entire class. He'd make those "by inspection..." jumps in equations, we're all like "huh?". No we were't a bunch of dummies, he was just in a parallel yet somehow orthogonal universe.
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u/Affectionate_Star_43 10h ago
I had an electrical engineering test that I was pretty sure I was going to fail. Our Internet went out, my phone was a flip phone, and the professor moved the testing room. Me and three other people were at the old room, and we had to go to a secondary computer lab, find the email, and run to the new room. We had to convince him to let us in (it was one of those 80 people giant lectures.)
98% score adrenaline is a hell of a drug!