A Clever College Exam Story

Writer’s Note: the following story is fictional.

I had spent hours preparing for this exam and I wasn’t going to let a bureaucratic professor prevent me from getting the grade I desired.  No one ever aced this course, and I was going to do it even if it meant I would sacrifice sleep and leisure time.  At precisely 10:50, the professor told everyone to stop writing.  

“Anyone who continues to write will receive an F on his or her exam.  You know the rules.  Please bring your exams to the front.  I am very serious about this.”

I had to write a conclusion to my masterpiece to fully encapsulate it into perfection.  This wasn’t the ACT or an AP exam.  This was an essay in the toughest college course ever and I wanted it to be perfect and polished.  There were 500 students in this course, and if I wanted to get an A in this class, I needed to perform above and beyond the call of duty.  However, in order to manage a class of this size, the rules were very strict.  One student received a zero because he continued to write five minutes after the professor gave the warning.  That student subsequently was forced to drop the class.  

Like clockwork, all the students rose from their seats and traipsed down the aisles to hand in their exams.  When my pencil came to a stop at 10:58, I was the only student left in the auditorium.  The professor was piling up all the blue books in neat stack.  

I approached him, quickly trying to think of a way to coax him into showing me some mercy.  

“Here’s my exam, have a good day!,” I said.

“No! I cannot accept this.  You know the rules by now.  Pencils down at 10:50 or you get an automatic F,” the professor replied.

“Really?  Are you really going to do that to me?  Please take my blue book”, I responded desperately.

“Nope, I’m sorry.”  

Right then, an idea hit me.  “Sir, do you know who I am?”

He looked at me with an arrogant smirk.  “No, I don’t.  And frankly, I couldn’t care less.”

“Are you’re sure you don’t know who I am?”

This time, he looked back at me with a bit of tremble in his eyes.  My plan was working.  By now, he was probably concerned I was the dean’s son.

“No, I don’t.  For the second time, I don’t know who you are!”, he said rudely.  

“Great!”, I said with a cheerful tone and I quickly shoved my blue book into the middle of his stack, straightened out the stack to make my essay indistinguishable, and jolted out the door.