“Can we trade Jamal Lewis to the Texans next year and get Reggie Bush?” – Young caller to the Brian Billick (Radio) Show. This eleven year old is now my hero.
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Finals week makes me paranoid. Like marijuana, except... well, they make me high. And they make me want to sit around and do nothing. And they make me eat all the time. What do you know, finals week is marijuana. Even a lot of furtive smoking when no one’s looking.
There I am, in a sprinter’s starting stance, as if I was in the blocks, pointed at the door to room 460. At the fifteen second warning, I arched my back, ass pointing upward. I’m sure the people in the back of the room couldn’t figure out what the hell I was doing. All they could see was my ass. At five seconds, my legs started to hurt, so I had to stand up, and at zero seconds, I picked up my exam and left the room.
Open book exams are the worst. Sanctioned cheating, if you will, except the difficulty scales upward in conjunction with the ability to scan all your notes. When you cheat on normal exams, its crap like “Choose the correct word: There are _____ letters in the English language.” Now, the sanctioned cheating doesn’t work on questions like “What is wrong with the form of this complaint?” Even worse, studying is that much harder because you’ve got access to all the information at your fingertips. You have to study, just to know where to find all the information, but at the same time, you sort of want to study just to know where it is, rather than assimilating the information itself. So many times I’ve just memorized the form of the information, then flipped furiously through my outline in order to find the information during the test.
Time limits? Hah. Time limits are for mere mortals. Like the speed limit, time limits are just guidelines. I look at time limits and I laugh. Then I go faster, and faster, until I'm flying past the time limits, past the speed limits, past time and space. Granted, I laugh only because it is a simple miracle that this is where my life has taken me, to a few sheets of paper with convoluted directions, and questions that I can’t answer in any fashion that will please the good professor.
The school grants us the privilege of using our computers to type our exams. For the most part, this helps the poor professors, in the past doomed either to smudgy typewriters or poor poor handwriting. You know that today, with the increased reliance on keyboards and typewriters, incidences of legible handwriting have declined, perhaps to the point where it will become a prized art form, like post-modernism. People will see it, pretend to understand it, interpret it as they see fit, but have no real clue as to why it exists.
The worst computer use moment at the law school was our first semester finals, first final. This was one of the first years the law school allowed computer use on exams. The computer literacy level, even now, is somewhat mixed at the school. Back then, we might as all have been clubbing each other with the laptops as typing with them. I might well have been one of the most computer proficient individuals, which is quite sad. Room one-oh-seven is the largest lecture hall, and was made available for students during exams. I hate big rooms, so I went to some other room, some twenty to thirty person seminar room, typed, finished. As I left, many of my compatriots ran up and down the main stairwell, carrying their open laptops in their hands, their ethernet cables flailing, still attached to the ethernet jacks. No one could submit from that room. It turned out that one person had a virus, and that virus spread to everyone in the room. Keep in mind we were all freaked out at having to take these insane finals.
I’ve gotten better at taking finals, but there’s still some unholy energy that surges through my body, jumping from synapse to synapse like a frog on crack. When I wake up at six, six-thirty, seven on exam day, I can’t study, even though I have nothing else to do. Just sit there and stare off into the distance, envisioning what might be on the exam, rather than studying what might be on the exam. The seconds tick past. Still I sit. One-thirty. Damn, why do I have to wait? Can’t do anything all day. Can’t sit and wait, can’t study, can’t throw up.
So all I can do, all I can ever do, is let it all mix together. Jump around from point A to point B. Watch the second hand trip over each single tickline. Step into the runner’s blocks, pretend that this race is one that I can run, one I can win. Pick up the papers, walk back to my computer, and stare at the questions that speak sweet nothings to no one except me. Where am I going with this? Where can anyone go during a race, except to the final, the finish line?
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