Evading Education

University Hall's examination staff has its own private definition of utopia--a place where no student ever misreads a schedule or oversleeps, and every examination comes and goes with administrative smoothness. Unfortunately, about a dozen students every term forget to appear for their tests. And there are even a few adventurous souls who try unsuccessfully to crack the University's virtually airtight security system for printing, guarding, and conducting examinations.

One student, for instance, several years ago thought he would try to postpone the inevitable for a few days. He went to the examination room, pretended to scribble furiously for three hours, and then left without handing in a blue-book. When University officials called him in several days later, demanding to know where the missing examination was, he indignantly replied that he certainly had handed it in and suggested that a proctor must have misplaced it. He even presented a postmarked postcard as evidence that he had actually handed in a book. There seemed nothing for the University to do but grant him a make-up test--nothing, that is, until someone happened to glance at the postmark again. The card had been mailed three hours before the examination began.

Perhaps the classic case of examination confusion resulted from an hour exam in a Social Relations course one year. A student not enrolled in the course decided to pass some spare time by taking the test, even though he knew nothing about "inter-personal" relations except the jargon. A grader obligingly corrected the blue-book and returned it with a C-plus and the comment: "Good ideas--somewhat undeveloped."

In the days when private tutoring schools had perfected the art of outwitting examiners, the University's security problems were considerably more complicated. These tutoring programs--widespread until 1940--specialized in pre-digesting a variety of possible questions, and professors soon grew accustomed to reading blue-book after blue-book with the same questions answered in the same way. Finally faculty members began to take the law into their own hands and one professor emerged from his examination room and announced with satisfaction that his test had "wreaked havoc among cram parlor habituees."

Much more serious than the practice of "canned answers" was the tutoring school habit of attempting to gain advance information about examinations. In one method, a member of the tutoring group would go to the examination, while all the others gathered with a tutor nearby. After glancing over the questions for a few minutes, their confederate inside would stroll nonchalantly out of the room for a smoke and then sprint for the rendez-vous, exam in hand. An experienced tutor could easily analyze an examination in a few minutes and deliver a quick lecture on the best answers. The tutorial group would then march to the examination hall, explain that they had slightly overslept, and demand to be admitted. Thus some of the University's present time limits on entering and leaving have more logic behind them than many students realize.

In some exceptional cases, the University has permitted students to take examinations outside of Cambridge, even in foreign countries. One student who had to be in Cairo struggled out of bed in the middle of the night to take the test at exactly the same time as his classmates in Cambridge. For even the special proctor could not have intercepted a cablegram beginning "Examination in History 132 . . . ."

Sometimes special proctors for itinerant students carry their sense of duty rather far. Once a student received permission to take a few minutes out from an examination to serve as best man at a friend's wedding. A proctor was delegated to accompany him and the two hurried to the church together, just in time for the start of the service. When the minister called for the ring a few minutes later, he received a mild surprise, for two men stepped forward. One was the best man. Right at his side was the proctor, faithful to the end.