The weirdest midterm ever

I studied like crazy for my honors sociology exam, which I took this afternoon. We, the students, were given a sheet of possible questions for the exam, and we all met outside of class, came up with every possible detail relevant to the question. Then we put those honors-students brain powers to work (e.g. memorized every answer verbatim).

So imagine our surprise upon walking into class to take the exam that our professor has decided to make the exam closed-note, but open-book.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I typically carry a pretty full load around with me, so when I have an exam, I bring no books. What’s the point? They’re heavy and cumbersome, and you can’t use them on the test, so what’s the point? Anyway, not only was the exam open book, but we didn’t have to stay in the classroom to take it. As long as all of the questions were answered in the blue books and the blue books were under his office door by 5pm, we were golden. The only stipulations were that we could not use our notes and we couldn’t talk to each other.

Again, I don’t know about you, but honors students tend to have a certain way of doing things. You ALWAYS have your classmates’ backs. You have detailed and organized notes on every sentence fragment that has escaped the professor’s mouth. You study together a lot—we became honors students because we were smart, we remained honors students because we were able to make it social instead of boring. Moreover, we have learned much more about our subject outside of class by talking to each other than we have from anything we’ve learned in lecture. It’s sad, but our professor isn’t that great a professor. But none of us wants to go down in flames because of the prof, so we sort of grab hands and jump in together, meeting for study groups, sharing notes, etc.

So excuse us if, when cut loose to take an exam, we stay together, talk about it, and *gasp* use our notes (in theory, wouldn’t the notes contain less information, anyway?). So Cameron, Adriana, Sam, and I headed off to the Underground Coffeehouse to drink coffee (except me. Frickin’ Lent…) and take the exam. We shared notes, books and bounced ideas around, but pretty soon we saw that 5pm was approaching quickly and that our professor’s office was ten minutes away. Yikes.

We had a great time taking the test, but I really wish our professor would have actually told us about the test (that it was open book, that we could leave, etc) so that I would have budgeted my time accordingly. I put off some chemistry homework to prepare for an exam that required a whole lot less preparation than we were led to believe.

I think we’re all going to be less than forgiving come quarterly evaluation time…

Other than that, I’m doing chemistry homework and trying to get ready for the exam on Friday. I wanted to have my sociology survey finished by then, but now I don’t know if that’s going to happen.