It's finals week here at Mystery U and I am noticing perceptibly different reactions on the parts of the students and the faculty. The students walk out of an exam joyful and free, while the professor gathers up yet another stack of papers to grade and thinks longingly of the research she *still* doesn't have time to do.
But there is a common thread in these exam experiments...the nightmares about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's probably a variation on the classic nightmare about suddenly finding yourself naked in a public place.
My two exams are two days in a row at the same time of day. I must have checked the calendar a zillion times in order to make sure that Exam 1 was on Day 1 and Exam 2 was on Day 2, because I was planning to use my proctoring time on Day 1 to write Exam 2. And I'll admit that up until I walked into the classroom and saw the right group of students there, I wasn't convinced that I wasn't going to be caught with an unwritten exam.
So I must say that I was quite amused, when, 10 minutes into Exam 1/Day 1, a student from Exam 2/Day 2 showed up, frantic. She'd been sitting in a classroom waiting for her classmates and I to arrive and we hadn't appeared. I think she was quite relieved to discover that the exam was the next day and that she hadn't missed it.
I am less amused by the student who simply failed to show up for Exam 1/Day 1. I'm waiting to hear what sort of story she has to offer. I hope it's better than getting the date mixed up.
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Something similar took oh, probably a week or so off my life from stress, when my university, in their um, infinite wisdom, has exams, but hasn't realized how similar three buildings are named attached to the sports complex.
An additional lack of signage on two of them means that I, a non-sports sort of person, had no idea which gym complex was the one in question.
Found it, being only 15 minutes late, but I was near tears. From tales from classmates, this is not an uncommon experience, to have the right day but no idea which gym to head to.
I've lived that nightmare. The university printed the exam timetable on 132-column fanfold paper and pasted them up on the wall of a lobby. Somehow, while tracing from the left side of the paper (course number) to the right (time), I slipped a line and carefully noted down the following day. They were in the same place; perhaps I looked down while copying the place and got misaligned while looking up to copy the time.
When I got there and found my exam was nowhere to be found, I was... distraught. I checked the schedule, figured out my mistake, and ran panicked to the professor's office. Apparently my distress was convincing, because he just directed me to a seminar room down the hall, handed me the exam, and told me to bring it back at the appropriate time.
I forget now if or how he proctored it; I was not thinking about such things. He could have very easily brought in some marking work and done it nearby. I was just startled (and very, very relieved) by how un-disastrous it turned out to be.
Dear ScienceWoman,
Though I never missed an exam, it was a nightmare I had almost every year after the exams were over -- it was as if having that dream is the start of vacation for me. In fact, I continued to have those dreams even after I completed all my course work requirements. So, if the student do show up and missed exams because of mixing up dates, hope you will be kind to her.
Guru
Dear Guru,
Thanks for your concern for my student, and I would have been fairly nice to her if she had given me any sort of plausible story. Unfortunately for her, exams are now over, and I still haven't heard from her. I'm not sure whether to hope there's something really wrong and she'll have a legitimate excuse to save her grade or to hope that she just decided to blow off her exam and ruin her grade on a whim.
ScienceWoman
I regularly have the dream in which I wake up and discover that I was supposed to give an exam that day. It got worse when I started juggling daycare - my dreams involved my son running around my office while everything else was going on.