Beating the System

There always comes a time toward the end of the reading period when the enlightened wastrel begins to think less about the subject he is surveying and more about the exam. Even the diligent student becomes less concerned with knowing his courses and more with simply appearing to know. This brings them both around to the problem of how to outwit the grader, a problem which is met in one of three ways: 1. By appealing to his vanity as a scholar, which makes it difficult for him to admit that he doesn't know exactly what you are talking about. 2. By appealing to his instincts and sympathies as a gentleman, and 3. By simply confusing him and making him spend an inordinate amount of time proving that you are wrong. This he generally does not have time to do, since he must grade several hundred similar examinations in the space of a very few days.

The untimely decline of the glittering generality has forced the development of new techniques, and we feel obliged to report the most promising of this new crop of academic gambits before the examination period is too hot upon us.

Total Disagreement

First there is the system of disagreeing totally with tea instructor and his approach to the course. If we are dealing with a liberal professor, the correctly composed exam for the virtually uninformed should sound like the outraged bellows of the mossback, while the exam written for a conservative lecturer should do justice to the thinking of any red-eyed radical. Total disagreement is an effective exam technique for two reasons: 1. It requires far less information to write a general polemic against an entire policy than it does to criticize specific weaknesses in that policy. For in the latter, you are forced to know in some detail what the present policy is. 2. By disagreeing with him, you force the instructor to bend over backwards in grading your fiction lest he seem to penalize you for merely opposing his view.

Somewhat akin to flat disagreement with the instructor is the system of deliberate misinterpretation of the question. The question, for example, states that The Dolls House is a great play and you must discuss it in terms of A, B, and C. You have not read: The Dolls House, so you state categorically that The Dolls House is a lousy play and discuss Hedda Gabler, instead. Presumably you have read Hedda Gabler, and if you do a good job on it, the grader can often be lulled into thinking that critical analysis rather than desperation caused you to misinterpret the question.

The All-Purpose Graph

Perhaps the most lurid new system is that of the graphic thinker, particularly as demonstrated in the "graph for all occasions" (reproduced here). The feeling has been expressed that this graph can be used to prove almost anything. Its inventor does not himself know what it actually shows but is certain that it might prove all sorts of things. The graph uses letters, specifically Greek letters, to label its parts in order to retain the maximum number of possible meanings and to give it that scholarly tone, so important when attempting to baffle a grader. Under no circumstances should this graph be explained in any more detail than is absolutely necessary, and preferably not at all.

The rationale behind the "graph for all occasions" is quite simple. In recent years it has become almost a truism that a graph is one of the easiest ways to explain a difficult economic or social concept, probably far better than a thousand word essay on the subject. And at the same time, no one, least of all a professor, likes to admit that he doesn't understand a graph, the simplest way to explain anything. The net result of it all is that the "graph for all occasions," embellished with Greek letters and surrounded by a scholarly essay, permits you to "prove" all kinds of things which you know are true, but couldn't possibly prove without having done the work, an obviously insufferable burden.

Burden of Proof

Another daring approach to exam writing involves the general technique of shifting the burden of proof from yourself to the grader. For example, you are taking a science or math exam and have gotten hopelessly snarled in a morass of partially connected figures and equations. Yet you know that the grader knows perfectly well how to solve the problem, though integration and other forms of higher mathematics have always remained a complete mystery to you. So you circle what you think is the most significant group of figures you have derived and state in the margin that "the rest is simply a matter of elementary integration which I don't have time to do," or "from here it is just slide rule pushing." Chances are you'll get partial credit, and in any case you are certainly no worse off than if you had completely surrendered.

But for pure animal cunning, there is nothing that beats the "infra-supra ploy." You know that something is true, and you know the professor knows it is true, but you'll be hanged if you know why. So you launch into a scholarly essay on the subject. The first time you reach the point in question, you state the correct conclusion and in parenthesis say "infra" i.e. this will be proved later. Next comes eight or nine pages of malarkey--ponderous, confusing, perhaps even relevant in spots. Then you reach the conclusion, in which you restate the known "correct position" and write "supra", i.e. as we have already shown. If you have made the middle of the essay dull and confusing enough, there is not a grader living today who will be willing to go wading back through it, to see if the point was really proved. DONALD CARSWELL '50