32 thoughts on “Greater Moments In Higher Education”

  1. You know, I did this once in a paper in college – it something to do with James Joyce as I recall – and filled a few pages in the middle with an excerpt from De Bello Gallico, in Caesar’s original Latin.

    I totally got busted. Took me the rest of the term to dig my grade out.

    1. I got promoted to management after slipping a nonsense paragraph into the middle of a several-hundred page Air Force report on space transportation architectures.

      Not because of that, though. The promotion was because I turned in the report after an all-nighter, and the reason I slipped it in was because my mid-eighties word processing technology had eaten the original page and I had to submit an interim printout because there was no way to fix and integrate into final other than using the interim, given the tech of the day. I think the offending phrase was something like “FFR-8, FFR-7 [referring to architectures] Bla Bla Bla, go ask Tim [Gaynor for Rockwell/Boeing aficionados…].”

      No one from the Air Force ever called me on it. Which only confirmed my own suspicions about such reports.

      1. I once worked on a proposal where we didn’t respond to a full 30% of the requirements. (Why? Because a company lawyer told us not to!)

        Amazingly, we won the contract. I asked the proposal manager how that could happen when we were obviously noncompliant and it was mathematically impossible for us to get a passing score to boot. His answer was, “Oh, that’s . They always give us their contracts.”

        The day after the award was announced, one of our competitors filed a protest. (Go figure!) The day after that, the protest was withdrawn (obviously under pressure).

        I quit doing proposals shortly after that.

      2. One of my promo’s while working on an assembly line, I let a friend of mine read, he said “It reads really purdy but you didn’t say anything.” I said, “Isn’t that the point?”

      3. We produce UML DoDAF architectures for the military. My group often slips in little jokes to see if anyone is paying attention. Years ago, in the middle of a sequence diagram, we added “Got any 3s?” and “Go fish.” Only one person ever called us on it. Sometimes, we get creative with class names, especially if we’ve been at it for a long time. My personal favorite was ThisIsnotTheEventYouWereLookingFor.

        1. Reminds me of a startup I worked at. I ran engineering and saved headcount expense by doing lots of tasks myself, such as tech writing. In describing how our patented (back then) ethernet over fiber product worked I inserted technical jokes making fun of our sales VP. He heard back from his MacDonald Douglas customers who thought it was hilarious. He didn’t think so, but we’re friends to this day.

    1. Sorry to burst your bubble, but…

      Back in engineering school (1991 — gah, I’m old), another student inserted a recipe in the middle of a report to pad it (canard a l’orange, I think), and his grades didn’t suffer. Made quite a splash in the student body, let me tell you that… 😀

      I once “collaborated” on a lab report with a girl (i.e., you do half the calculations, I do the other, we get done in half the time). We turned in identical reports except for the handwriting. I got 3/10, the TA gave her 8/10 and “nice work.”

      Anecdotes are not data, but the situation does happen. You only need a tired teacher or TA.

      1. Well, this is disillusioning. In MY TA days in the early 80s, you looked for lines of reasoning, derivations and the correct conclusions which followed. Tough to fake that.

        I will admit to, ahem, being slightly less rigorous grading girl’s papers.

    2. I actually had a proof in a math class many, many years ago (I think it was combinatorics) where I had worked forward and backward from an equality to a point in the middle but I couldn’t prove the two sides to which I had worked were equal. So I wrote, “These are equal by the Triscari identity.”

      Got full credit.

    3. I did, i had a lab report in electrical engineering that was supposed to demonstrate Kirchhoff’s voltage law, and i wrote complete bollocks in the conclusion part about laws of attraction and Murphy etc, got grade A for the lab and was never called on it.

      I actually thought the old man did read conclusions, but later figured that he was just using all reports as firestarting material.

  3. I prefer to invoke Poe’s Law and just ramble incoherently but passionately. If they call you on it, just give a live performance of similar caliber and they’ll assume they’re just missing your point. Pretentious people can’t stand to feel like they’re being slow, so all you have to do is talk quickly and they’ll fall into line.

  4. Just take an essay from the great Jeremy Lavine in period 3. Hiis essay on El Nino was so good that people read it in a Youtube video. link

    El Nino is spanish. It is the spanish word for child. Like all things spanish, it is dangerous. It kills people and burns down trees. This child is more than a child. It really isn’t a child at all. It is a storm. A deadly storm that kills people and burns down trees.

    Warm water usually builds up around australia. But not anymore with el nino. El Nino moves the warm water from australia to somewhere else, namely to other places. Where are these other places? These are places that also have water, but water that is usually not as warm as the warm water El Nino moves to these said other places. These other places are to the east. Of the water.

    In Peru, they have many names for many things. One of the things they have names for is for people who go fishing, go fishing to make a living. If we had a word for this kind of people that word would be “fisherman”. But we don’t. In Peru, they have different names for things than we do in America. They call that kind of people “pescadores”. That’s Spanish. That’s what they speak in Peru. When El Nino comes, these “pescadores” can’t catch any fish. El Nino is caused when the Peruvian gods get angry. They have been angry for millions of years and have made El Nino for millions of years. Many many moons ago, the Peruvians committeed human sacrifice to satiate their gods and end the flood that was caused by El Nino. In today’s modern dog-eat-dog work-a-day world of scientists, diplomats, McSalad Shakers, and George Bush Jr., we no longer have access to such solutions. We are too proud. We will not commit human sacrifices. We refuse to satiate the Peruvian gods. Thus, they remain angry and keep killing us and burning down our trees with El Nino.

    Instead of satiating the gods, many of these “scientists” have tried to control El Nino with “science”. They put up expensive fish-attracting bueys that run on flashlight batteries. Imagine, fighting the power of the gods with flashlight batteries! Needless to say, this didn’t work and everyone died.

    The teacher wrote, “Jeremy! A little less drama!” ^_^

    2. “I am El Nino!

      All other storms must bow before El Nino!

      Yo soy El Nino! For those of you who don’t habla espanol, El Nino is spanish for… The Nino!” 😀

  5. Being a masochist, one of the things I enjoyed about International Space University was the European-style exams. None of the multiple-guess cr@p (or the example above) graded on a curve you find here in the US. Essay questions requiring detailed answers. I think my record was 16 or 18 handwritten pages in four hours. These were then distributed to 40 or so members of the faculty, who would grade on their specialties, but could review everything. It was totally hardcore, dude.

  7. I’ve inserted a blank page emblazoned with “THIS PAGE MISTAKENLY LEFT BLANK” in at least two official documents I was assigned to write, and it was never noticed (to my knowledge).

  9. Not that it couldn’t happened but I am calling shenanigans on this one looks like their holding a piece of paper over the orignal written response. Looking at the he bottom of the page you can see some oddness with edge of the page the bs text paper seem to be extending beyond the page of the exam and you can see some text to the right side of the bs text

    1. The “oddness with the edge of the page” is just another page in the multi-page packet for the test. If you look at the angle of the top page in the picture and the page underneath it by looking at the edges of both, you’ll see that they’re just askew because they’re stapled together in one big packet.

      I’m more surprised that nobody has commented on the use of pencil and the lack of any semblance of cursive or semi-cursive in the abysmal handwriting. That paper must have taken forever to print with a pencil.

      2. My printing is barely legible, if I concentrate. My cursive? Might as well be Old High Martian.

        If anyone needs documents translated into Old High Martian, I can help! 🙂

  10. This makes me think of when my brother and I used to proofread our professional Correspondence years ago. He would send me a rough draft, I would spruce it up, and he would do the same for me.

    But we are brothers, so we would also include all sorts of easter eggs in our writeups, so that we made sure that we reviewed the ammended writings.

    My personal favorite was when I included in a paper “Like a needle beaked finch pecking at a gallapagos booby.” and bro missed it and passed it through, then I got an e-mail a couple days later. “WTF! is a needle beaked finch, and goddamn Gallapagos booby?”

    I was both horrified and entertained.

  11. Seeing some of the responses, I have to say that I’m proud of this compliment I got between the ages of 22 and 24, while I was in the service.

    EVERY time my Platoon Commander got a question they couldn’t answer, they said, “Ask my Hipp.” No kidding, I wasn’t a random servicemen, I was THEIR HIPP. One of my fellow servicemembers during a J.O.B. actually said, “I don’t need to know that at this moment sir, I have a Hipp.” and again, “We need a volunteer.” and before what the officer needed a volunteer for My NCOIC or PLTCom would say, “Hipp? they need a volunteer.”

    It was really quite funny, but it was a long time ago and not the same as now, though it’s completely true.

  12. I’ve had the reverse happen. I was taking an exam on a rocket propulsion course (calculate the thrust and duration of JATO units to get an airplane of a certain size off the ground in a certain distance sort of thing).

    I knew just what to do and wrote it all out.

    I got a zero…. a ZERO!

    And there was not another mark on the paper. So I take the test to the prof (who graded the tests) and ask him to at least tell me where I went wrong. He looked it over and
    said well yeah ok this is correct – and gave me a 96. Why a 96? Well I took a roundabout way of getting there, he said.

    I took the 96.

    so I think the prejudice works in both directions: if the scoring person has a preconceived notion of you, that’s what you get on the test.

    Another story from a departed friend of mine:

    he was getting an electrical engineering degree and had a prof from China as the teacher. Turned in homework; 10 questions. Andy (my buddy) gets a zero. Incensed he takes the homework to the prof. Prof looks it over and says, “Yes? You got wrong answer”

    Well they go over each problem and it turns out Andy made an arithmetical error here, transcription error there. So Andy complains, “Hey it’s clear I know HOW to solve the problem. These are just minor errors. I should at LEAST get partial credit.”

    Chinese Prof’s reply (imagine a very strong Chinese accent):

    “Youuu engineeer; you build bridge; bridge fall down; NOOOO partial credit!”

  13. I had a professor try to slip one of the “insoluble” problems past us on a test, just to wee what he’d get. “Applied Advanced Calculus for Chem Es”.

    The question was a permutation of Fermat’s Last Theorem. a^n + b^n = c^n, where Fermat writes something like “I have a proof, but this margin is too small!”

    I ended up using Clarke’s Law as the crucial step in my answer. 😀
    (We retroactively find out that those 30 points aren’t actually part of the test, just his way of making everyone’s butt stay in their seat until the end of class. What a guy.)

  14. …once…back at the Academy…I took a test no one ELSE…could pass.

    No one Cadet had…EVER…beaten…that TEST. They’ve since…changed the parameters….for the…Kobayashi Maru… Exam…

  16. Btw, i think grading should be done by machines, if at all possible.

    With the rapid advances in natural language processing and machine cognition you could almost do an automated pass over random text even now and flag up nonsense that
    a) was not properly understood by machine
    b) is actually nonsense in a given context, like EE lab report

    1. There is a text analyzer which rates the grade level and readability of the text.

      Sometimes an entire paper can be impossible to understand and be completely full of bafflegab, and get published in a peer reviewed journal. The Sokal paper has a text readability score of minus 32 on a 0 to 100 scale (with “See Spot run. Spot runs fast.” scoring 119), so a negative readability score is a good indication of nonsense.

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