Three States of the World

“There are three states of the world,” Dr. W said at the beginning of class on Thursday night. “You can take your test now, you can take it in thirty minutes, or you can take it on Monday.”

Over the past several years, I have taken many, many tests from Dr. W (~15), and I have at least three of his classes in the grad program. His tests are admittedly a terror to prepare for and take, but he is an absolute saint when it comes to flexibility in taking them. If you’re not ready to take the test when it is time for it, he will let you take it at an alternate day or time, AND he does not penalize you for it with points lost or by giving you a harder test if you wait. He has been known to allow five or six alternate times up to two weeks after a test was originally scheduled.  

“The point is not to stress you out,” he has said on many occasions. “The point is to have you learn this stuff.” Only once in all his classes did I ever postpone a test that got the best of me (he did a double-take that time), and that was last semester for the finance exam before the final. My classmates routinely took him up on alternate exam times, and there were times when three or fewer of us took the test on time.
 
What makes his tests so hard is that it is by and large brute memorization of concepts you really don’t understand. He gives you study questions consisting anywhere from 50-80 (if we’re lucky) essay questions that vary by difficulty. We have to prepare for all eighty of them, but then we are only tested on 12-14 of them. Each question usually has several “sub-questions” contained within, and so it is not just the one question you’re answering—it’s multiple questions. Here is an example:

#9. What is the difference between a tractable and intractable problem? What is the difference between an algorithm and a heuristic? What makes a model robust?

We all agreed that this particular test was one of his hardest tests to prepare for to date, and was the one we were least equipped to handle in a long time. I would rate the difficulty of it right up there with my finance final. There are a couple of us who have two of his classes right now, and we had just been through the memorization routine with first test on Tuesday night of the same week. As soon as the test was over, we had to start in on memorizing the material for the exam on Thursday night.
 
So when Emily begged for thirty more minutes of study time, he graciously let us have it. That was the first time he allowed us to use up class time for studying, but it was a “state of the world” for which I was extremely grateful. Ten minutes before class started, I discovered I had overlooked a sheet of questions he had given us at the end of the last class. So I had an additional 6-7 questions to learn in a very short time.
 
You hate his tests, but you just can’t help but love the guy himself. He does anything he can for you. As Dr. W often says, “The goal is to graduate people with skills,” and he does what it takes to ensure just that. I just wish I liked the process a little better.