How to give your students an exam, for the evil bastard.

Well, let’s see here… I upgraded Wordpress and enabled Akismet, so hopefully I won’t be getting all those terrible little “Please moderate: OMGLOLDISCOUNTPHARMACY1387872348522!!!” emails. By the hundred. Scroll to the bottom of the page, and you’ll see the Akismet Spam Counter indicating how many pots of meat product have been eaten!

… Anyway.

I also got a MORE tag out of the upgrade! I shall use it here.

Based on a class I’m taking now. Identity of professor protected to ensure I don’t get him pissed off… you state-tenured prick.
Anyway. If you just happen to be a professor, and you have a class with around 200 students in it, wherein the entire class score is from 3 exams… here’s how to give an exam… like an evil bastard. Bwahaha. More tag coming right up: Step 1: First off, you wait until all 200+ students are in the room, and then demand they all get up and move to different seats. This would kind of make sense, only it doesn’t, due to Step 5.

Step 2: Ask all students to turn cell phones off. Not just on silent… off. At this point, turn away anyone else who comes to the door. This is at 3 minutes before the scheduled start time.

Step 3: Have 30 assistants who were sitting down near the back get up and start randomly wandering the room, staring at people, and kicking out those who have the wrong kind of calculator (or none). One of the assistants now produces one of those cheap and nasty ‘Bug Detector’ devices that’s basically a preamp’d RF field strength meter, and walks around the room. Upon still seeing random pulses of signal on its display, this assistant motions to the professor, who threatens to have everyone kicked out of class on academic dishonesty charges if the device is not disabled. Eventually, the detector falls back to baseline after someone figures out their laptop wasn’t *really* off. 12 minutes of 110 wasted so far…

Step 4: Loudly shout at people over the room’s PA system (driving it WELL into clipping by at least 15dB) that they are to leave if they still have any notes out. Everyone just puts them away and doesn’t leave. Things will get worse yet, though. 5 more minutes mysteriously wasted.
Step 5: Have assistants (!) distribute the exam forms and Scantron sheets. There are six exams, and they’re distributed so that nobody next to each other has the same exam version. This kinda nullifies step 1 making any sense.

Step 6: Announce that you’re going to collect everything 15 minutes before the end of the class session, and that anyone who isn’t ready cannot turn in the exam.

Step 7: Waste 15 minutes giving weird instructions as to how to bubble in full name and student number offset by a certain number of digits on the answer sheet. Sure, it makes sense.. to someone out there. That’s all that matters, really.

We’re now at 32 minutes into the session, shortened by 15 at the end. That’s 47 minutes out of 110, 63 minutes remaining for the exam.

Step 8: Instruct students to start. Your 30 assistants are now to wander the room, staring over everyone’s shoulders.
Step 9: Wait 5 minutes and have your assistants snatch away the papers from in front of 10 selected students and kick them out with no explanation.

Step 10: Place illegible correction information on projection screen at the front of the room. KILL THE LIGHTS! At this point, take great pride in knowing that at least five problems on each exam do not have a correct answer listed.
Step 11: Kick out 3 more students for unknown reason… having campus police mysteriously show up to escort the last one out. ?!

Step 12: Wipe the projection after 2 minutes, then put up a giant ugly Javascript timer with a dumb animated gif background running on your laptop in a Safari window. Corrections are now no longer available…

Step 13: Ask for exams to be collected 5 minutes early. Collect them 15 minutes before the end anyway.

Step 14: Distribute grades.

Exam Scores From Hell.

(That, at the very top, was my score. 47. Note the distribution.)

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