A few days ago I mentioned here (at the end of the second blatheration) the common “anxiety dream” or nightmare that many students have. It involves suddenly realizing that you have a class that you desperately need in order to graduate but you completely forgot about. It’s now time for the final exam and you never went to a single class, you’re 100% unprepared, but YOU MUST ACE THIS TEST!!
Like many college students, I would occasionally have such an anxiety dream when I was an undergraduate, more than thirty years ago at UC Irvine. But one year, circumstances and a shot in the dark conspired to let me beat that subconscious torture, and I’ve rarely had such dreams again.
It was probably some time in my junior year when the classes I took all coincidentally had their finals on Monday and Tuesday. This totally sucked because I had to take four or five finals in just two days. On Tuesday night following the barrage of intense cramming and testing, I had a bad anxiety dream of this variety.
When I remembered the dream on Wednesday morning, something from an earlier Psychology 101 class popped up. It concerned treating phobias by aggressively forcing the patient to confront what they were phobic about. Someone’s terrified of spiders? Get them a tarantula! Are they catatonic just thinking about getting in an airplane? Take them skydiving! That sort of thing.
I wondered if this kind of technique might work in dealing with these recurring nightmares. I had three days coming up in which I had no pressure, no stress, no finals.
What if I went and took a final exam for a class that I had never been to or never studied for? While it wouldn’t be a class that was required, I could easily make sure that I wouldn’t even know what the class was until I got into the auditorium for the test. What did I have to lose?
This obviously wouldn’t work for an upper division class, since they usually had only a couple dozen students at most. If you hadn’t been there for a single class but showed up for the final, you would stick out like a sore thumb. But for a lower division “core” class, it would be a piece of cake.
The “core” classes are taught in huge, tiered auditoriums seating hundreds of students. Also, the tests there are often multiple choice using some kind of Scantron form, possibly with a couple of essay questions that would get written out in a standard exam notebook.
The finals schedule was like scheduling for the movie theaters – something like a round at 8:00 AM, a round at 11:00 AM, a round at 2:00 PM, and a round at 5:00 PM. All of the major buildings had at least one auditorium. I got a couple of exam notebooks, a couple of Scantron forms, a couple of #2 pencils, and just showed up at an auditorium in one of the Fine Arts buildings. (I was a physics major.)
I was not disappointed. There was a final there and it was 100% multiple choice, no essay questions. A couple hundred questions, some kind of art history class, maybe “History of European Art 101”. No one paid me the slightest attention when I grabbed a seat near the back.
It was a little bit like playing a really long game of “Jeopardy” with just one category and no little ditty to hum along to at the end. I have always been an avid reader with pretty broad interests and a good head for (useless) facts, so my answers weren’t completely picked at random. I could often confidently eliminate one or two of the answers, which upped the odds.
I didn’t do anything to try to make a mockery of the whole thing, like filling in bubbles at random and finishing the test in the first ten minutes of the two hours allowed, thus freaking out everyone else in the room. I took my time and did my best. Yes, there were a lot of questions where I was guessing at random, but there was no pressure. Who cared if I got every single answer wrong?
The next week I went to check how I had done. In the hallway outside of the professor’s office was a computer printout with student ID numbers, scores, and grades. They were in order by student last names, which weren’t shown for privacy reasons, making the list look like it was in random order. Way down at the bottom, following a couple of blank lines, was my student ID number and score, with a big question mark drawn next to it along with the notation, “See me”.
The entirely logical assumption was that some legitimate member of the class had foolishly filled in the student ID number incorrectly on the Scantron form and now was in danger of not getting credit for the class. I never heard from anyone, so I guess it never occurred to them to work backwards and find the student associated with the actual student ID number given. That just wouldn’t make any sense.
And by most normal standards they were correct, it didn’t make any sense. Who in the world goes and takes a final exam for a class that they never took? Well, I did. And it worked. I have almost never had that particular recurring nightmare again. (I have other recurring nightmares to deal with, but that’s another story.)
Oh, how did I do? I don’t remember the exact score, but it was less than 50% correct, somewhere in the high 40% range. But I remember getting a C- since they were grading on the curve. That score would have passed the class.
That score also meant that I did better than a significant number of students who had actually taken the class and needed the grade.
Those guys are probably still having nightmares.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 