Measure Theory Interblog

I was proctoring an exam last weekend. One guy comes in (late) wearing a button down shirt with the top 6 (out of 8) buttons not done up. Like. What the fuck. He seemed like he thought he was hot stuff or something. I think there should be a no shirt, no exam policy. Or something.

While I was proctoring today. The question says something like “there’s a 30% sales tax and the price tag says $400″ and he asked if the tax was included in the price or on top. When the class has NEVER dealt with any type of thing where there was tax included in the price. ALSO, more importantly, in the majority of north american countries “sales tax” means “on top of the price.” There’s no way the question was ambiguous.

Also, I left the room for a minute and when I came back everyone looked at me and you could tell there had been some major cheating going on.

Back in my wild and crazy youth when I thought it would be “fun” and “cool,” I used to proctor math exams…..willingly. Sometimes I would proctor the exams that my students were writing. When I told them beforehand that I’d be proctoring, they’d usually like the idea and half-jokingly suggest that they could ask me for “help”. And, I’d smile and tell them that if they ask me any stupid questions (along the lines of “What’s the answer to this derivative?”), then I would probably lie to them or tell them an equally stupid answer (”I’m pretty sure the answer is Neptune. Or possibly George Washington” “Ummm…that’s not one of the choices” “Just write it in. The prof will be so impressed, you’re sure for a bonus mark!”). It never ended up happening, but I was kind of hoping it would. Now, when I proctor economics exams, I am already lost with the material, so I don’t have any idea what a stupid answer might be. Oh well.

I just finished proctoring an exam for 2 hours. Some thoughts:

• Despite me writing “have your student cards on your desk”, announcing this to the class and the prof announcing this to the class, this is the first exam where all the students actually did this. Except one, who seemed to confuse student card with driver’s license. And even when I asked him again if he had his student card, he handed me his driver’s license.
• A lot of students wear earplugs during the exams. At first I thought they had some kind of yellowish infection in their ears (the earplugs are yellow)
• The exam was on International Trade — something I know very little about. Actually, nothing about. So, I was a bit worried someone would ask a question and it would become apparent to them that they were smarter than the grad student. Luckily, this didn’t happen.
• One person put up his hand to ask if he could borrow a pencil from the guy next to him. Another person put up his hand to ask if he could borrow his friend’s calculator (who was also right beside him). Ok. I can understand how, if they just took the calculator or pencil, it might look like cheating. But really, this is not something worthy of me getting out of my chair for. In fact, you could probably go ahead and cheat and I wouldn’t care. As long as you were kind of pretending to be sly about it. (I’d be able to tell anyways, but it might keep me entertained for the hour)
• Proctoring exams is much more fun as an undergraduate. As a graduate, it’s pretty much required and we get the same amount of money every month whether or not we proctored much that month (though we have a certain number of hours we have to do each semester). As an undergraduate, we get paid right after. There’s more of a direct feeling of payment, which is nice.
• Proctoring feels a lot like detention. Except that I can stand up and walk around. Mostly though, it’s pacing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Trying to read a magazine, except that you brought the issue with all the university reviews which is the most boring issue I could have thought to bring. Updating the chalkboard with the time every 5 minutes (because the architects didn’t feel the need to put a clock in the room) is the highlight of the 2 hours.
• For the first hour and a half, everyone is relatively calm. During the last half hour, you get the “oh shit, I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m going to fail” expressions appearing on people’s faces. On my face, you get the “hand in your fucking exam so I can go home” expression.
• People like to have massive amounts of items on their desk. I think it’s like a security blanket, kind of. People had watches, cell phones, bottles of water, coffee, pop, numerous pencils (one person had 12, I guess in case the first 11 broke), pencil cases, wallets, sunglasses.
• The exam code is now automatically filled in by computer on the scantron sheets. We have scantron sheets with the 111 code on them, the 222 code and the 333 code. We have to match them with the right test booklet when we hand them out. That’s right, people were screwing up FILLING IN CIRCLES enough that they decided only grad students and faculty are qualified for this. How these people got university, I will never know.