my efficiency epiphany
June 17th, 2004
i found myself sitting in an exam once again today, the subject was languages and compilers. quite a hard one, but clocking in at a mere 90 minutes.
for the 5th time this summer, i was amazed by the amount of people who leave the examination hall at the earliest possible opportunity. in a 90 minute exam, there is a window of 20 minutes, between minutes 60 and 80, when you’re allowed to leave the room if you have finished early.
bang on the 60 minute mark, hands go up and people begin to leave the hall. by minute 80, only about 15 of the 100 or so students sitting the exam remain.
is this not absurd? quite a substantial exam, and people just leave the hall as soon as they can. and it’s a complete mix of people, it seems people who genuinely care leave at 1 hour, as well as people who don’t. this has absolutely plagued me for some time. and maybe i just figured it out. or figured something out.
everyone has their excuses, “i didn’t know the answer, so i left”, “i couldn’t think of anything else to write”. all this time i’ve always just assumed that these people were slack, the reason they leave is because they can’t be bothered to read their paper through again. to double and triple check their answers.
suddenly at minute 80, i’m hit with a thought. this isn’t just to do with exams, this is participation in general. something i get quite confused about, the lack of participation in things. voting. community-oriented activities.people caring about things which impact the way they live their life every day. people attending lectures. students in particular, don’t seem to like to participate. all of a sudden i realise i am in the minority, the remaining 15%.
maybe the other 85% really do have something better to do with their lives than sit in exams, than attend lectures, than spend large amounts of time studying. and maybe that is why people don’t vote, why people don’t actively do things in a community-spirited way. because people think more efficiently than that, maybe people consider what they could have achieved having not done all these things. maybe they calculate that if they spent an extra 50% of their time on studying, they’d only raise their mark by 8% and it wouldn’t be enough to break a grade boundary.
maybe people are more efficient than i give them credit for.
2 Responses to “my efficiency epiphany”
1tom smith
June 17th, 2004 @ 22:56
what time was your exam; i wonder if the exodus had something to do with the football? in my day (uh oh, dad rant), everyone had to wait until the end of the exam, at which point we had to wait some more while our papers were collected, etc. i imagine this leaving earlt lark is disruptive to people still working.
2tom
June 17th, 2004 @ 23:07
the exam ended at 3.30, so people were leaving about 3.. it is ridiculous. they don’t collect papers any more, you just walk out and leave the paper on your desk and hope it ends up in the right place. :)
exams suck. that’s for sure.
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