Exam Blooopers

Thanks are owed to the professors--and especially graders--who took the trouble to recollect. Any letters, to start a new compilation of exam blooopers, will be appreciated.

Student exam stories are of the "there but for the grace of God" school:--about the boy who slept through his exam on the steps of Mem Hall, or the hopped-up case who wrote his answers on one line.

Faculty stories, on the other hand, concern exam content; Gertrude Stein's bluebook is famous. Dear Professor James, it ran, I am sorry but I don't feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.

The next day she received a postcard from William James: Dear Miss Stein--I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel exactly that way myself.--A.

But the bulk of tales, like the ones which the Gen Ed A men post in their office, concern bloopers--on finals, in essays and on orals.

Many of these are unconscious--for example, the boy who wrote of Moby Dick that "Ahab met his death at the hands of the whale," On orals especially, unwariness can be deadly. On an American History oral, someone gave the date for the transcontinental railroad as 1840. "Why did the Forty-Niners go around the Horn?" he was asked.

Trapped, the boy stated that it was because of the high rates. "And of course, they didn't have Pullmans in those days," he added lamely.

Even more of an innocent appeared in an American History and Lit oral. One professor, an authority on the 19th century, asked him Whittier's views on slavery.

"Why, sir, don't you know," he explained, "we don't read poets like Whittier and Longfellow any more. We read only good ones, like Whitman."

An even shorter oral--reputedly the shortest on record--is told of a graduate student up for his Ph.D. in American Civilization. His first problem was to trace the sexual imagery in The Scarlet Letter.

"I haven't read The Scarlet Letter."

"Thank you. That will be all."

Yes, words are confusing. Even more so in definitions. One freshman was asked to define blank verse. Blank verse, he wrote, was "verse in prose civilized like we talk." And there was also that wonderful metaphor found in Gen Ed A theme on the drafting of athletes: "The cream of baseball was being poured into Uncle Sam's uniform."

Perhaps some of the confusion stems from first exposure to literary jargon. A freshman in Humanities, analyzing carefully on a final, found that "Dante used Beatrice as a phallic symbol for divine love." When the exams were handed back, his section man asked him about it. "I thought phallic just meant sort of literary," he said.

There was less excuse for the student studying Allegro. In this work, the poet speaks of reading Ben Jonson's play Learned Sock. It came out on the exam thus: "Young Milton, out strolling in the country, saw Jonson's socks."

It would be unjust to leave Milton without speaking of his greatest work--and of a marvelous capsule analysis of the motivations of one of its characters. "Satan in Paradise Lost," one exam perceived, "is what Milton would have liked to have been if he hadn't gone blind." But then, this bit of biographical lore doesn't seem so bad when compared with the identification of Hogarth as Beowulf's grandfather.

Spelling errors crop up yearly. One undergraduate in statistics, obviously concentrating too heavily in science, wrote of a "tetrachloric correlation." And a Soc Rel section man saw a reference--probably by a boy from Michigan--to a "Deus ex mackinaw." Or perhaps he lived near the girl who wrote of ancient Troy's Scalamander River.

Spelling alone, however, cannot account for the duke's strategy, whose motivation can only be guessed. The subject: English history. "At Blenheim Marlborough directed his atacks at the right wing, where were stationed the most delectable French troops."

In another English history exam, students were asked to show how the power of Parliment increased under the sovereignty of the Tudors. To one boy, it all boiled down to this: "Elizabeth's first Parliament begged her to marry, advice it would never have dreamed of giving her father."

If Elizabeth's legitimacy is in doubt, however, where does that leave poor Nausicaa, who was identified as a "rare form of Greek disease"? Although this might have been merely grim humor, another identification in the same course--Hum 2--was more purposefully thought out. The passage, from the Divine Comedy, described Mathilda taking Dante across the river Lethe, and giving him a symbolic baptism--washing away sins so he can enter Paradise. Mathilda tells Dante, "Hold me! Hold me!"

Identification: "Aeneas courting an Amazon."

The name of pius Aeneas calls to mind that of the immortal poet (70-19 B.C.) of whom it was written: "To be a Christian in Vergil's day was like being a Communist today." Ah, well, perhaps it is the wave of the future.

On the closing blooper I have no comment to offer. It was written by a 'Cliffie, taking a test on Paradise Lost, and I quote: "After the Fall, of course, Eve found new ways to manipulate Adam.