Reaffirmation

It is the nature of the school I attend that we are frequently invited to bring equation sheets to tests. They are generally one or two notebook pages, and we are allowed to fill them with whatever content we wish, obviously excluding the answers to the tests. Most students obsess over their sheets, packing them with small print from margin to margin, abbreviating, outlining, and compacting to no end. My sheets generally consist of a few spaced lines of equations taking up one quarter of the page, which if similarly compacted would scarcely occupy a tenth of the sheet. It was so equipped that I approached a test today.

It is a frequent complaint of my classmates of every major that our school demands of us unusually heavy studying. Not so for I. This last weekend I spent high virtually every day. The test I spared no mind whatsoever as I enjoyed some films by Miyazaki and others. My preparations were only to create my cheat sheet and to skim tests from previous semesters, both of which I did entirely in the hour immediately preceding the test itself. I believe I also consulted one page of my notes. On the way to the test I ate an apple; lunch. Lately I have replaced lunch with a fruit. It takes less time to prepare and doesn't bog me down during the day. It appeals to my sense of traveling light and of culinary asceticism.

Allow me to tell you at length about how I take tests. This may be of interest to those of you who are not so skilled at this art, as I consider myself a master of it, and I have numerous scores to agree with me. It is in large part my fortune to be born into a society that ranks us by tests that is responsible for my intelligence. Just as you can only be told so many times that you are stupid before you begin to believe it, from a young age I heard constantly of my amazing intelligence, and while this bred in me great arrogance, it also ensured that I would never, in those early years, doubt myself. That was to come later.

The greatest flaw of a test is that it must be written by a person with an understanding of the material, and the very material about which it questions, which it must therefore reveal to some degree. The most obvious of these flaws are inexcusable. For example: #21) Which of the following did Politician X establish during his career?, followed by #47) The most notable effect of the passage of the Placeholder Act of 314 under Politician X was _____. Anyone with a short-term memory and the patience to review their work can capitalize on these giveaways. But this is so crude that it hardly conveys my meaning. There are more subtle hints that accrue across a test. Internal consistency is a powerful tool. One answer often leads naturally to another. This is only more true in engineering. What I do is so much more than the recitation of tired facts or the brute application of equations. I build castles in the sky. Begrudgingly given stones I stack until I scrape the clouds. I derive, friends! I derived very nearly the entirety of the material, because memorization is for chumps. These sciences are so shallow and clear.

Let me take it down a notch. I am full of triumph and find it difficult to express myself calmly. In short, I found the lectures and notes to be of little help and conquered the subject using only the information given in the problems, a scrap of notes and my own intelligence. It was deliberate and methodical and resulted in a test which I am confident I scored well on. The exhilaration of success lies in knowing that these hoops through which I am asked to jump are nothing to me.

What confidence I once had has faded with the years. To have it again is a good feeling.