Taking exams sucks. I think this is something that we can all agree on.
Last semester I had to take an exam for my class ‘History of Religion in America.’ It’s a decent class; in general, I don’t have any major complaints about it. But there was a lot of reading to be done for the class, and, much like any other college student, I can’t honestly say that I get all of it done.
So I was faced with a problem: What do I do with the essays for this exam, since I don’t seem to know nearly enough to pull off a good grade? So again, like any other college student, I just sort of BS’d it.
In this particular case, the essay was about Dorothy Day and how she incorporated Catholicism into her life and work. I think I did an okay job at getting some point across, which was the intended idea. I’m okay with getting a moderate grade on the exam, as long as my GPA is high enough to keep my scholarship.
But a thought struck me while I was writing the essay. What if, for some odd reason, all records of Dorothy Day’s life were erased from history? No one was able to find anything about her in any book anywhere except for my exam essay.
What an odd predicament that would be, wouldn’t you agree? What a horrible injustice to Dorothy Day. She appears to have done some great stuff in her life. (Honestly I wouldn’t know, I didn’t read the biography we were assigned.)
Think about it. Would you want the entirety of your life’s work summarized into a poorly written college mid-term exam? I know that I would probably find that to be one of the greatest insults that life could hit me with, and life has hit me with some pretty harsh ones before. Just ask my parents.
Imagine a thesis statement like “Dorothy Day found Catholicism very inspirational” immortalizing you through history. I suppose it could be worse. It could have been something like “Dorothy Day thought Catholicism was cool, man.”
But I can only picture a post-apocalyptic species of people, or some alien race that has come to earth after we are long gone, attempting to discover as much as they can about the human race and, of course, they stumble across my exam. Maybe they would consider it sacred, or possibly they would regard Dorothy Day as a god and me as her prophet.
Some of you might be thinking that entertaining this thought, which did occupy time that could have been spent writing my exam, would have led me to try harder to construct a better essay. But no, I continued to write it just as badly as I had started. As I said before, I’m comfortable with getting a moderate grade, just as long as my scholarship stays untouched.
Dorothy Day is really the one that should be concerned, not me.
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Notes From the Underground:
Asa Fager
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February 7, 2003
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