Last night in class the professor handed out our take-home midterm exams and then we went over the questions. We have seven questions to answer and the maximum number of pages should be 8-10. The questions start off easy and the last couple are going to take some serious thought. A typical exam. Thank the lord it is essay and not multiple choice because I despise multiple choice exams.
Just when I think the people in class are pretty smart, the school administrator in the back of the room, the same person who is in a PhD program, raises her hand. There is something wrong with her because she insists on clarifying every single assignment as if she were as dumb as a box of rocks. Her question may as well have been, “Do we need to form complete sentences?” because what she asked was about as stupid.
This is no one’s first class because of the prerequisite requirement so there should be no excuse for graduate students asking questions like the ones I heard last night. I’m pretty sure the bottom line of all this is to find out if we’ve picked up concepts and if we are able to synthesize the information. Then we must show that we know how to apply the knowledge to whatever it is we’re doing. And, we need to be able to clearly communicate how we know what we know. It’s not that hard.
At some point during the line-by-line clarification of questions, I realized the expression on my face was one of “what the fuck is wrong with you people” and I quickly turned my face towards the wall and then examined my shoes.