Long ago, back when this troper was her in second-last year of primary school, the entire year ended up taking an excursion to an old camphouse ground out in the bush. On the first day we were shown a long but very low to ground obstacle course out back and seperated into four groups who were placed at opposite ends of the course and made to compete at crossing the obstacle course without touching the ground, while using two planks of wood, a rope and a sandbag (none of which were allowed to touch the ground and had to be taken to the end) as our only tools and with only the 'group leaders' the teachers had just chosen allowed to speak. For extra incentive the winners would get icecream if no one accidently spoke or fell to the ground. The first two groups went out and the first immediately cheated by walking across the ground everytime they thought the teachers weren't looking. When the entire second group lost it and called them out about it, both teams were sent off to their cabins and told they'd have to do it again tomorrow. My group (the third) and the fourth were next, and while the other team did exactly as the first and cheated across pretty much the entire course, the group I was in did as we were told; we shut up, ignored the other team and concentrated on getting to the other end as quickly and carefully as we could. Because we didn't complain about them, the other team easily beat us to the other side and (since they were now allowed to talk) proceeded to taunt us about being slow, clumsy, etc. Eventually we made it to the end and the teachers got all of us groups back together... In order to inform us that what we had just done was an old training program for mountain side emergencies, with the sand bags we were carrying meant to represent food bags, the ground meant to represent the drop off the edge of a cliff and the reason we weren't to talk was to avoid tiggering an avalanche. If that wasn't sobering enough we were then told that those who did not pass this test today would miss out on the day's kiaking but if they didn't pass before we left they wouldn't be allowed on the final year ski trip.

Take a quick guess who's group was the only one that didn't have to re-take that test that day.

This troper is conducting a rather simple and even not-so-secret one with his girlfriend: Recently, she cheated on him because she thought they were going to break up temporarily. She confessed right away and regrets what she did, but in order for this troper to know for sure, he has simply stated 'he can't handle this again.' All she has to do is simply NOT cheat on him again or see the other person, who conveniently lives far away. This seems pretty simple, because an honestly sorry person wouldn't do something wrong twice. Should she fail this test then she will not receive the leniency she did for her first offense, which has caused this usually confident troper to have a secret {{HeroicBSOD}}.

Good news is that she passed the test after I asked her about it this weekend. Bad-ish news is that I still broke up with her in order for her to get her head straight. Sucks because we really do love each other. We will get back together in half a year or so (maybe sooner), although I will always be very cautious about her actions, because I will not be cuckolded and I will never be screwed over twice.

There is a story (which may be an UrbanLegend) about a student taking a philosophy exam -- on the paper was the question, "What is courage?". The student simply wrote "This" and left the exam hall -- he was awarded full marks.

Similarly, another urban myth has a philosophy final exam which was simply the question, "Why?" The student answers, "Why not?" and turns in the exam. It turns out he's the only student that gets full marks, as the simple, yet elegant answer proves he has the soul of a philosopher.

The "soul of a philosopher" sounds suspiciously like the soul of a smartass to me.

If you've ever read anything by or about Socrates...pretty much, yeah.

This troper heard that story from a teacher. Apparently, another student wrote "Just because" and got a C.

This troper's mother actually got this final exam in a college philosophy class that emphasized the Socratic method. She didn't give the correct answer, but she still got a B for the essay she wrote discussing the question. She found out later that the weird guy who never attended class was the only one who answered correctly and got an A.

This troper had a music teacher with a philosophy degree where the final exam question was 'is there a god?'. She told the story of the guy that simply wrote 'yes' and headed off to the pub, and ended up getting a First. (The top award in a UK degree course.)

In a similar line, this troper was given a question on an economics test asking the students to explain the main characteristics of "a state of Cournot-Nash monopolism". Since there's an economic concept called "Cournot-Nash oligopoly", every one of us assumed it was a mistake and described the existing economic concept, only to be told that the question was included as a trick and the answer was "There's no such thing". Thankfully, it was only an in-class test; if that had been pulled on a major exam, somebody would have ended that day lynched.

Another variant of the philosophy test story goes like this: "Is this a test?" "No, but this IS an answer."

I had a statistics professor whose pet peeve was the use of "data" as a singular noun, and on the first day of class, he said there would be a "What is wrong with this sentence?" question on the final where the answer was "It uses 'data' as a singular noun." True to his word, it was there, and people were asking where to write their answers, because it didn't fit in the (actually rather generous) space provided.

Similarly, this troper had a Bio/Chem teacher who started the year with scientific naming conventions and extolled the awesomeness of the name of the Douglas Fir, telling us it would be on the Final Exam. And never mentioned it again. Everyone who remembered ''Pseudotsuga menziesii menziesii'' at the end of the year got a chance to politely snicker at those who didn't...

This troper's friend once took a Philosophy final exam in which his teacher placed a chair on his desk and asked the class to write an essay proving that said chair did not exist. My friend was the only one to get perfect marks. His answer? "What Chair?"

What pumpkin?

This troper has heard several versions of that story.

And a second example this troper lived through, from Biology class in high school. A teacher asked a class to prove to him that his car was not alive. He had an argument for every single theory the class could come up with, including that there was nothing alive in the car (the wooden panels, actually, used to be alive), it didn't breathe (actually, engines require air, so yeah, it respirates), and it didn't eat or drink (requires fuel to run, so... actually, yeah!). Finally, one member of the class stood up and said, " Prove to us your car's not ''dead''." We so thoroughly used his own arguments against him- just reversed- that he gave the whole class an A on an upcoming test that we didn't have to take.

Why didn't anyone point out it couldn't reproduce? Prove it's not dead is pretty dumb from a bio standpoint.

Eunuchs can't reproduce either...

Cars don't grow. All living things grow for some portion of their life cycle. Yes, all of them. Even the paradoxical frog.

They do grow, in a sense, while you're making the car.

Indeed, the definition of life requires a lot of refining - ''The Biology of StarTrek'' pointed out that all kinds of things could count as alive depending on your definition - growth (crystals), using energy (fire) and so forth. (Then it pointed out that the ''Trek'' answer to the question of "what is life" was "all of the above", what with things like the Horta and all the {{Energy Being}}s.)

A car can not self repair/heal whereas all other life forms can.

Does that mean that installing an automatic troubleshooting app would bring my computer's operating system to life?

And nobody argued that as all living things replicate themselves (at the very least, are composed of cells that replicate themselves), and as not even at the 'cellular' level do cars in any sense have this ability one can prove cars are definitely not alive... well, all I can say is {{YouFailBiologyForever}}.

Not all living things can replicate themselves. You can be alive and infertile. Plenty of colony animals are even alive and sterile by design. (Does this make cars the sterile offspring of the "queen" automobile factory?) And not all cells in a multicellular organism are capable of replication either. You could argue that the car isn't made of cells, but that seems like a very narrow definition of life.

Even infertile things replicate themselves on the cellular level. Do you really think biology has such flimsy definitions and standards that the definition of life would be broken in the face of infertility? YOU fail biology forever. I ain't even gonna link to the page. And FYI, to be considered alive, something must exhibit all of the following; cellular organization, metabolism, homeostasis, growth and reproduction (the theoretical capability, not necessarily the actual capability, i.e. infertile things don't fail the definition of life) and heredity. If that class full of geniuses couldn't come up with a way to demonstrate that a car isn't alive, clearly they never even read Chapter 1 of their Biology book (and the professor is more of an idiot for giving the WHOLE CLASS an A for ONE smartass's snarky, wannabe-rebel response -- a more accurate counter would be, "That's not the way science works; you don't disprove things, you prove things. It's up to you to prove that the car is alive, not us to prove it isn't.").

Take a gun and shoot the cars gas tank. Then drive it till it dies. The car is now not "alive".

What about having genetic information, undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, respond to stimuli or adapt to their environment through natural selection?

Aged 11, this troper sat a test at school where the first instruction was "Read everything before you do anything" and most of the rest involved doing things like making holes in the test paper or shouting out silly words. The last instruction was, "Don't do any of the previous instructions." This troper was one of only two members of the class to pass, mainly because she intuited that since the teacher wouldn't normally let anybody make holes in the test paper or shout out, there had to be a catch.

This troper took the test too - more than once, he believes. It's probably fairly common, but he doesn't know the "official" name, if there even is one.

This troper took it... and failed. ;_; It was silent work, like doing calculations, not {{shout out}}s or holes, though.

This troper took a version without shouting and passed and, as a bonus, was able to spend the last 15 minutes of the test watching a fellow student snicker about the test's lack of difficulty, and said student's reaction to the final instruction.

Well ''hello'' Mr Fancypants! ''This'' troper failed like the rest of his class. And the members that didn't fail? They'd taken it already!

This troper took the test, read all the way to the end, didn't do any of the instructions, and was ''still'' failed on it because he got bored waiting for the rest of the class to catch on and doodled on the paper. (The instructor reasoned that the instructions said "don't do anything".)

There's a classic variation of this trick used in math classes. Students are asked to multiply some outrageous list of numbers... which includes a 0 toward the end.

And if you did that in a computer program, the compiler would probably optimize out the other terms. Gah! Our computers are already outsmarting us! We're doomed!

We got this one in the form of "Please expand (a-x)(b-x)...(z-x)". It was this editor's friend that realised that (x-x) is 0.

This troper got this test and spotted the trick to it immediately (having a natural tendency to glance at the bottom of a page), but started following all the other steps anyway after about 10 minutes of being bored to tears as the teacher waited way longer than any fifth grader he's ever met could possibly have needed. Later on, he got the same test in another setting, and spent the time writing out an explanation of how the test was impossible because the last instruction was poorly worded such that it required one to disobey itself.

This troper was assigned this test out of a textbook. The teacher read the steps in order, marked each of the troper's answers wrong, and had to go back and cross out her own marks after reading the last instruction.

This troper would like to point out to anyone taking this test in the future that you can simply argue that the test itself is absolutely pointless. Actually following the first instruction of "read everything" does not necessarily preclude doing anything after it. In other words, even if there is an actual final instruction of "Disregard everything else," it doesn't matter. You're supposed to do that last, after everything else! Naturally, this only holds if it is a listed instruction, which means it's part of a sequence (if it's just an admonition, no game). This troper seriously wishes he'd had the chance to do this, so godspeed!

Actually "Don't do any of the previous instructions." includes don't do the first one, I.E. read the list, so you can point that logical error out too.

On this troper's version the last step said to ignore everything but reading all of the questions and writing your name, so it's about following directions. I did read it, but I didn't have a clue what it meant (or just did some of the things; it was four years ago) so he failed anyway.

Never done it himself, but this troper has had friends get that sort of test in foreign language classes. It was to see who knew the language well enough to understand that first instruction.

This troper got that version as well, with 1 being "Read everything first", 2 being "Write your name in the square" and 30 being "Carry out only instructions 1 and 2." The response given? "There is no square on this paper, just a rectangle. Please try again." The marker wasn't at all impressed by my basic geometry knowledge and I failed it. But I scored the moral victory!

Not really. The above troper looked silly by not getting the RefugeInAudacity he probably deserved. Not his fault, though. That marker should have been more GenreSavvy!

This troper encountered the test in a literary work well before being given it in class, and therefore passed with flying colors. Score one for early readers!

This troper encountered it as the first thing done on a course at school. I passed due to my diligence, patience, logical thinking ability and the fact that I had a friend who'd done the course the year before and had warned me about it.

Almost everyone in this troper's fifth-grade class passed the test- because we almost all cheated. My neighbors noticed I wasn't working on it, so they stopped, and so on... Talk about a WarpedAesop.

It's me again, the troper who first mentioned this... I spent most of the test trying to suppress a fit of giggles. It's probably not a coincidence that the only other person who passed was sitting next to me.

i loved that test. especially when i heard the groans of disbelief. IIRC, it said, disregard all previous instructions except the first two.

This troper has had this test as well, and believes that it is one of those things Teachers do when they want an easy period.

I got that test to. I spent the entire time writing an essay on why the test was stupid. I was the only one that passed.

The successor to this test is one with a similar list of instructions. The tester tells you that it is not the one where the last instructions tells you NOT to carry out the previous instructions. You then check the last question (even the last three to be safe) and miss the FIRST instruction telling you to write the answers ABOVE the question. Shows how easily distracted you are, as well as allowing you to go over the answers (how many months have 28 days, answer: 12).

Though not that extreme, this troper seems to recall a test or two which at the end told the taker they didn't have to do one or two of the most time-consuming problems, and is half-sure half-unsure that he had a test which instructed the students to shift their answers a couple questions up or down on a scantron sheet.

This troper's father encountered a similar test- in college physics. The teacher told the class to read all the instructions carefully. The test was 100 problems long, so most of the class didn't bother. The third to last instruction, however, said to only do problems with numbers divisible by 25.

But if it was the third last question out of 100 that said that it would have been the 97th question and technically every number is divisible by 25 just not as whole numbers. I am confused...

instruction=/=question

Also, in the context of the rational numbers, you use divides as ''a'' divides ''b'' if there exists a ''c'' in the integers such that ''ac'' = ''b''. Sorry about being a RulesLawyer, but this is fairly close to my BerserkButton.

Also, "the third last question out of 100" is the 98th question.

This troper took one of these in sixth grade which failed spectacularly when the teacher put "read all the questions first" at the top of the page but forgot to put the final question (aka the "disregard everything" question) on the sheet. When he got mad at (ALL) of us for not following directions, we pointed this out. To his credit, he was quite embarrassed and apologized for yelling at us.

We once had a similar case. The last instruction was garbled badly by a faulty copier and wholly unreadable. So most of the class simply shrugged and proceeded to answer the rest of the question. Only one who already knew the test passed it and was insufferable smug about it. Might have been an Aesop about "not complaining when your copy is unreadable".

This troper also had a test like that. I read the questions before reading the instructions to read all the questions first. After seeing the end, I pulled out a book and covered the last question. Cue berating from the person who sits near me, competing for top of the class since first grade. She goes along, and with five minutes left, gets to the end, and lets out a yell. The two of us were the only ones to read the last question, but I was the only one to pass.

@/RobinZimm faced tests like this twice, and failed both times. GenreBlindness, anyone...?

{{@/Griffin}} laughs at your puny minds! She encountered a similar problem in a kid's puzzle book (it was one of those where you take a phrase and edit it, and one instruction said "don't do number 4") and immediately thought, "One of the instructions must tell me to skip another instruction!" She had ''never'' seen this test before.

This Troper took the test in sixth grade and proceeded to work halfway through, even asking the teacher a question for clarification regarding a question you weren't supposed to do. Then he figured out the trick and smiled.

This troper's psychology professor gave a portion of the class the task 'debate why stealing to save someone's life is wrong, from the perspective of the sixth stage of moral development'. At the end of the task, we were informed that no one at the sixth stage of moral development would ever argue that, so the only correct debate was, "We cannot debate this."

Ah, but you could. Sixth stage is abstract principles. Is stealing the higher abstract principle from a justice prospective, or is it a disregardable law? A skilled psyche student should be able to debate anything.

Or should he?

You should stop before you cause this page to spontaneously combust.

Is it right to save this page from combusting?

This contributor's best friend would enact such a plan as this every six months. He would be embarrassing, rude, difficult, contrary, insulting, etc. in a deliberate attempt to drive away as many friends as possible. After about five years of this, the person settled down among those he considered "true friends" and went so far as to marry the girlfriend who put up with all of that.

Your best friend sounds like a Jerkass, according to this editor. Then again this editor is a cynical bastard as he happens to know people who would stay with the best friend because they are spineless and not because they are shining, wonderful people.

Seriously. Who would put up with that? Some "best friend" that is, treating you like shit to confirm some warped standard of loyalty.

Let me introduce you to {{House}}.

...which is a TV Show (and a mighty fine one at that!). If you enjoy watching a show about a JerkassStu being awesome, that's fine. If someone puts up with stuff like that in the real world for five years, they seriously need to grow a backbone. Or get better friends. Of course original troper, I say this only with the above paragraph for reference, and completely unaware of the full details of those 5 years. Just making a generalization...but he ''does'' sound pretty {{Jerkass}}-y.

In fairness, that he enacted the plan once every six months implies a considerable amount of time without said plan... Sounds like he wanted to make sure they would stick together despite whatever fights may come, without actually picking a fight or leaving the others with any regrets.

This troper had a history final where the last question read "What grade do you think you deserve for this class?" This troper wrote "B" while his friend wrote "A". When the grades came in, his friend got a "B" while the troper got the "A".

So much for students who believe that they can earn an "A" through hard work.

Furthermore, what "history" did that exactly teach? "Humility leads to failure?" Reckon you should have given your teacher a bit of a talking to.

Well... as written, it would be the opposite, since neither got the grade they said they thought they deserved.

But is there any evidence that that question actually had an effect on the grade received? It could have been just the teacher's way of getting a feel for how students thought they did vs. how well they actually did.

This troper always answers "B" to those questions, no matter how well she thinks she's doing, so the professor doesn't think she's too egotistical or too hard on herself. It's worked out so far.

This troper once had a college professor (of science) who told of a test where put a beaker of (fake) urine on a table, dipped a finger in and licked his finger, then told the class "Now do what I just did". It was a test of observation; the finger he dipped was not the finger he licked.

This troper knows a guy who was the victim of this when he was in Africa. With elephant dung. Yeah, he fell for it.

This story was originally told about Dr. Joseph Bell, the man on whom SherlockHolmes was based.

This Troper went to a CCW class whose instructor has ''never'' failed someone for the range time or written test portions of the class. Not an overwhelmingly impressive statement, since both tests are fairly easy, but that's including a Dayton Daily News reporter who had come in intending to fail the range test in order to get a story. Several students have come out of the class without their certificate, though. Both the law, and the instructor's conscience, require him to sign off that a student is safe with a firearm. As a result, he's designed the class to involve a lot of time where students can make small talk, and have to handle loaded and unloaded firearms in a 'boring' situation. The written test and target practice is the state's requirement. His test, and the one not pointed out at the start of class, is that students who make off-color, racist, or sexist comments, or who point loaded or unloaded firearms in an unsafe direction be kicked out.

In middle school, this editor once took a ridiculously difficult final (for junior high level, at least) on the book ''Cry the Beloved Country, '' which included essay questions of a philosophical nature based on the themes of the book. The catch? At the ''very'' beginning of the test, written in the directions no less, were the words ''If you are reading this right now, do not take this test. Turn it in blank and watch your classmates squirm in their seats for the rest of the period.'' Most students eventually figured it out after realizing people were finishing their tests at impossible speed. (In hindsight this editor thinks that the teacher may just have had a perverse sense of humor rather than was actually trying to find out which students would read the directions.)

This troper would say that the teacher mentioned above definitely had a perverse sense of humor. He/she used the word "squirm", for heaven's sake!

This troper had a teacher who put actual questions in the directions for a computer class exam. And by "actual questions", he means "write the name of this class at the bottom of the second page" questions.

This Troper keeps up an elaborate {{Jerkass Facade}} as a screening mechanism against people who have very little insight. Those who aren't very observant will go "That guy's a {{Jerkass}}" whereas others will notice I very quietly do things that are apparently entirely out of character (and eventually figure out that's actually my real character). As a result, I have intelligent and insightful friends. It does help that I make friends really easily (How do I do that with a {{Jerkass Facade}}? Simple: {{Rule Of Funny}})

Are you the best friend of the contributor a few entries back? Acting like a {{Jerkass}} in the belief that anything is justified if it serves your ultimate ends is called ''being'' a {{Jerkass}}.

"Sometimes we put up walls, not to keep people out, but to see who cares enough to tear them down."

Ah, but "He who fights monsters should take care, lest he himself become a monster", so if you become a jerkass to fight other jerkasses to stop annoying you, you should pretend to be a wall unless they tear you down, in which case either they or you are the monsters. And then John was a zombie.

A jerkass zombie.

Or, as Vonnegut put it, "we must be careful what we pretend to be, for we are what we pretend to be."

This Troper had a friend who had a particularly mischievous biology teacher. This teacher had apparently given out a seemingly regular exam paper to the class; the catch was the fine print in the corner, instructing the reader to take that paper back and get the real one from the teacher. Unfortunately, the instructions were so tiny one would have needed a magnifying glass to make anything out of it. The abovementioned friend got lucky though, as he noticed a classmate (one who had figured it out anyway) was returning the paper, and just followed her example.

This troper has played a game called The Game of Common Courtesy in which players sit in a circle and pass around a lighter saying "In this lighter I see... This is The Game of Common Courtesy" and then passing it to the next person. A player is only "right" if they say "Thank you" when they receive the lighter.

This troper knows a man who loves to organize large games of "Simon Says." Naturally, he begins by instructing everyone to line up so they can get started. Anyone who does so is immediately disqualified; "Simon" didn't say to line up.

Does he actually say "get started" or some variation? Because if he does then he's admitting the game hasn't begun yet so no one has to wait for Simon to say.

This troper, in elementary school, had to take tests to be qualified for a gifted/talented class. One of the tests was a maze with the instructions simply saying "draw a line from start to finish". I drew a straight line from the start to the end, not bothering to follow the maze. It worked.

@/{{Griffin}} saw one of those before, but when she told her mom the answer, she got scolded for not doing it the right way. (There was no way to get through the maze normally.)

Subversion: Several years ago I was taught English, History and Geography by what basically amounted to a thirty-year-old Yahtzee Crosshaw with a teaching degree. One double-period, we all entered the classroom and he failed to turn up. We waited five minutes, he still wasn't there. We waited for ten minutes, he still wasn't there. The ''entire class'' proceeded to ''diligently do our work'', because we suspected he was the kind of guy to pull this on us as a test. As it turned out, he was in his office down the hallway and had forgotten he had us at all.

There's an UrbanLegend where a professor leaves his hat on his desk after he arrives early to his class, and then heads to the bathroom; on his way back he gets into a long conversation with a colleague. His students skip the class after he fails to return in an amount of time specified by the college handbook. The next day, he tells the students that since he left his hat on his desk, signifying he'd return, they're all getting marked down for absence. The day after that, the professor arrives to find the classroom empty... but every desk has a hat on it.

This Troper's school has a "peer support" program to help ease new year sevens into the school. This year they held a huge scavenger hunt/race thing, and one of the clues featured a ridiculously long list of odd instructions. Fortunately, this troper is very GenreSavvy, and noticed the last instruction saying "Do NOT follow the previous instructions, they will only waste time", instead doing the real (and ridiculously simple) task: writing everyone's names and birthdates on the sheet and handing it in. While all the other groups were seen piggybacking each other and dancing around in circles and whatnot.

This troper had a much-loathed 8th grade social studies teacher (a complete perv with a Lolicon for his students) pull a half-assed version of this -- if I remember correctly he said to read the directions first and you got graded down if you had put the date on the paper. Never mind that this was the same teacher who would rip your head off (while staring down your shirt, of course) if you turned in your paper without a date on it, so by this point most of us were conditioned to write their name and the date before anything else, including reading the directions. he was a major JerkAss, though, so what could you expect.

This troper will just pore over in detail the elements of a fishy-sounding test or scenario, to avoid failing these.

This troper was subject to some ''glaringly'' obvious ones when he had to do some psychology tests as part of a class he was taking. ''All'' of the tests began as a set up like, "See how groups work together in building a Lego Battlebot," then it became obvious it was testing something else. For example, in one, "testing" how people can work together over the computer, it became obvious that the other "teammates" were fake when A. everybody "typed" perfectly and instantly, and B. one in particular went through instant Main/CharacterDerailment. One sentence was normal, like, "Well, I can't wait to get started," while the ''very next line'' was to the effect of "Are there any women in this group? Women are lazy and stupid!" Apparently the real test was in how we responded to bigotry, but it lost all effectiveness with how hamfisted it was.

In a psychology class, this troper's teacher had everyone get into groups of two. She told us to grab one another's arms and choose a person to go first. I was chosen in my group. She then told the first person to pinch the second person until she said stop. Despite the guy whispering he wouldn't mind, I simply continued holding onto his arms. When it was his turn, he didn't pinch me either because I didn't do it to him, or because I was a girl. When the experiment was over, the teacher had the class talk about how the experiment made us feel. Then, she asked why I didn't follow the instructions. I told her I had moral objections to causing pain. I was declared to be on a higher moral level than my classmates. Since I already had a reputation as a sheltered, goody-goody this didn't surprise anyone or send them into an outrage. To be fair, she also asked my partner why he didn't, but he gave a vague answer that basically implied if he had a different partner, he would have.

This troper heard about an almost impossible enginnery test, but it was designed to be, well, like that: The real test was "who invents the best gadget to cheat?"...Probably one of the best exams (and best teachers) I've ever heard of.

Another in the "make sure the students read the instructions" vein, this troper's geometry teacher would always have the directions include, "and initial the box for a point."One classmate who always forgot to do this eventually became GenreSavvy and checked the box without even bothering to read the instructions...the one time they read, "and do not initial the box for a point."

Our class had a watered down version of this. Basically before the teacher gave us the assignment he told us each group would only get to ask ONE question about the assignment. We happily did our work until we came to a question asking us to trace a circle. (this is middle school 7th grade mind you) When there was nothing to trace with. So naturally I went up to him and said "I don't know if this counts as my one question, but we need circles to use tracing in betwee-." Before I could finish he said, "That was the question you were supposed to ask!" He then handed me the materials and me plus the rest of my group got to watch everybody else go up to ask for the materials. He turned away EVERYBODY in the classroom because none of them could answer this simple question. "well why do you need them!?" Needless to say, our group got a good laugh out of taunting kids who begged us to tell them why it was required to complete the assignment. To which we would respond "Go bugger off and read the paper more closely, were working!" Not a single one got the packet except for us. I assume the test was about how perceptive the students were.....apparently not very.

I was in a simulated-society game for a psych class once. Since we had been studying compliance experiments (like the Milgram and Ashford ones mentioned in the main article), I was convinced for most of the duration that it was a test on following inane and seemingly arbitrary rules. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

This Troper and a friend of hers are both convinced that everything their psychology teacher asks them to do is, in fact, a test/observation/etc. The teacher administered the Keirsey personality test to her classes at the beginning of the term and proceeded to make neat lists of everyone's results. This troper finds the class easy to the point of boredom, so she tends to write during class. The teacher found out about the troper's participation in Nanowrimo; said troper doesn't want to think what conclusions the teacher has now drawn about her mental health.

This Troper had these in the second, fourth, and eighth grades. In the fourth grade, it was the standard "read all the directions first/the last direction is don't do anything". In the second, it was rather stupider that he was the only one that passed, as the first direction was "don't do anything." In the eighth, he was told to write a paper about what he did during his Summer Vacation. This Troper wrote a detailed argument paper on why he shouldn't have his privacy infringed upon in such a way and got the only A in the class.

This Troper is a member of an organization where the induction ceremony includes a secret test of character. The Troper passed the test, but was so pissed off by the deception that he had nothing to do with the organization afterwards. You could say that the organization failed the Troper's (unintentional) secret test of character. (Note to anyone planning a secret test of character: this is a real danger which is usually conveniently overlooked in the fictional examples: if honesty is one of your subject's values, he may want nothing to do with you after passing your secret test of character.)

This troper's father is a psychologist. He says that the quickest way to end a conversation is to admit this since people will automatically decide that you are examining their every word and making diagnosis about their mental health. IOW people think that every conversation a psychologist has is a SecretTestOfCharacter.

This troper once rejected a potential psychologist on the grounds that every conversation with her was ''not'' a secret test of character.

This troper was party to a disaster training scenario involving a simulated plane crash, with a large pool of jet fuel underneath the wreckage that was in imminent danger of catching fire. The actual test wasn't to train the local firefighters to do a rescue, it was to see if they'd make the decision to put aside their previous training and get as many victims out as fast as they could, even though that meant not dealing with the most serious injuries until last and, essentially, condemning some to death.

This troper's algebra teacher gave a test that tested the student's ability to read instructions after two weeks of obnoxious behavior on the part of the class. He stressed that the class was to follow the directions ''exactly'' before passing out the tests. The direction was something like, "Write your name on the line, put your pencil down, and sit quietly until I tell you otherwise." This troper passed. Most of the class didn't. Other students ended up quacking like ducks or standing up and turning around three times before they finally read the directions at the top of the page.

In this tropers Chem class, for the midterm we were told to read the instructions, because following instructions is a very important part of mixing chemicals. The instructions start out repetitive by saying what you can or can't ask for help in, and so on. Somewhere in the middle it says to leave 5 questions blank since they should be questions we shouldn't be able to answer. Attempting to answer those questions would be a waste of time and prevent anyone from getting a perfect score. One person did end up getting all five of those questions right and showed the pages of worked required, but only got two points for his effort.

Never TakeAThirdOption? Or never try to exceed expectations? This one seems to be a BrokenAesop test.

Both of those seem to be perfectly viable Aesop's for school, taking a third option is heavily looked down on in most classes, this troper was in one where we had to implement a system and had two possibly ways listed to do it, an easy but inefficient system and a much harder more efficient system (worth extra credit). There was, however, a third option the teacher didn't think about which was as easy as the first system and just as efficient as the second (as it did essentially the same thing, only without the difficulties). The third option (which a number of people found and used) was given no more points than the inefficient one.

So the Aesop is Teachers Are Jackasses?

No, it's "Teachers of practical skills care more about following the prescribed rules than actually producing the best, most efficient results."

This is what most of applied science strives to do and is about. Maximize the output with minimum input. To an extent, as circumstances dictate.

So, the Aesop is "your teachers suck".

This troper's Chemistry teacher described a lab that he had run in previous years (and, time allowing, would run this year) which, if done right, produced a beautiful purple solution, but missing one ingredient near the beginning of the procedure would result in a disgusting looking mixture. Needless to say, it wasn't difficult to spot the unwary.

This troper's economics teacher, on the first day of school, handed out the typical syllabus that needed to be signed and returned. Everybody signed the paper, but when we went to turn them in, the teacher told us to look down near the bottom of the page, where one of the things we had all agreed to was to give the teacher 10% of all our future income. This was the first of many secret tests.

This troper is annoyed to endless degrees by various forums and software programs that do this to an insane degree, such as having you click a period somewhere in the middle of the EULA to agree.

Kind of the point of military promotion boards. Sure, you know that you, a junior enlisted soldier, will be sitting in front of a group of senior noncommissioned officers (which may or may not include a {{Drill Sergeant Nasty}} or two) and answer a series of questions on general military knowledge. What you don't know is exactly what criteria you'll be graded on, or whether the panel will be throwing some off-the-wall questions or situations at you, or if you'll be seated under a dripping air conditioner vent to see how you'll react.

I once put in a job application at ACS and was asked to take an interview only three days later. Afterwards, they told me to come back in 90 days for a second interview. I kept looking for jobs until the 90 day mark. When I returned to ACS, the first thing they asked was if I had gotten a job somewhere since the first interview. I told them that, yes, I got one at [=McDonald's=]. They revealed that the point behind the 90 day wait was to see if I just wanted to get a job or if I was hanging onto some vague chance of getting the job at ACS. I got the job.

This Troper has heard of an ethics exam, in which the people being tested had to go one by one to an exam room, along the route were situations where people needed help, and the test was, would they help others, even though they had an exam to get too.

This Troper's martial arts sifu, when he was little, spent an hour every morning for four months, knocking on the door of an apparently closed Kung Fu dojo. Finally, a man opened the door and told him, "I'm sorry, but you cannot train here. Go home." Three months' more knocking and refusal went by. Then, the man who answered the door, instead of telling him to go home, beat the stuffing out of him. Three more months of this went by, before sifu was finally able to enter. There were fewer than a dozen students in the meditation chamber, all sitting in the horse stance. Sifu was told that he could not train there until he could sit in the horse stance for 45 minutes straight. I learned a lot from this man.

Non-academic example: This troper's family has a particular cookie recipe that's not horrendously difficult, but takes patience and a willingness to think outside the box. Anyone who wants to marry into the family has to attempt the recipe - with help from their fiancée's relatives, of course. Those who fail the test - especially those who get married anyway, without the family's blessing - tend to be unlikable at best and abusive at worst. Those who pass, while they may still be flawed, invariably end up beloved by the rest of the family. To give examples, my father (who passed) is his mother-in-law's "favorite child". My ex-uncle (who failed) was emotionally and financially abusive to my aunt and her children for over twenty years, and she and the children have separated from him. No one outside the family is allowed to see the recipe except for the test, and copies are only passed down from parent to child. (It's also used as a rite of passage for teenagers - this troper made her first solo batch at the age of sixteen, and they were perfect :)) Yes, my family is cultish and weird. We know.

This troper took part in an academic study when young. The subjects were told would we would be a 'baseline' for general knowledge among the populace, as part of a larger study. We were told total time would be under two hours; one hour to take a 100-question test, and another hour for evaluation of the results and payout; 10 cents per correct answer (The reason given was 'to ensure an honest effort'). We finished our tests, and waited. And waited. Long after the 2nd hour was up, many of us just wanted to leave, but we were strongly discouraged from doing so, and told that would invalidate the whole study (should've been a tip). Finally, after about 2 hours of waiting, they handed back the tests, and the payout. But that wasn't all - they wanted to go through the answers, to make sure everyone was graded properly! Another hour of going one by one through the questions. Finally, they asked if everyone was satisfied and ready to leave. Why yes, we were. At that point, the reveal - it hadn't been a baseline after all, but a psychological test. Everyone had had between 1 and 5 questions marked as correct that were actually incorrect. The test was whether anyone was moral enough to stand up in front of everyone, and try to give back the extra couple dimes. The testers seemed saddened at the general moral decay of society that their study had proven - not one person had wanted to do so. Never mind that most just wanted to escape at that point, having other commitments that the far-overrunning study was trampling on. Or that the grading had actually been sloppy in both directions and several people had been shortchanged instead of overpaid. Or that they were so eager to reveal what horrible people we were that they never considered that we may prefer to come up quietly afterward to settle up. Nope - all about us being unscrupulous and greedy.

I think I just thew up in my mouth. What a bunch of hypocrites.

I'm in very disorganized med school (the schedules are wrong, sometimes we don't have class for any lame reason and the first week the only subject we had was anatomy), and one of my friends started to say all that was because of this trope ("think about it, the doctor has to be always expecting a turn of events in a surgery..."). This troper, however, believes the whole campus is being that disorganized due to lack of money but if he's happy thinking that...

When this troper was being taught to be a coxswain (the person who steers and co-ordinates a boat of rowers), he was told in no uncertain terms by the man teaching him to stick rigidly to the rules of the river. Before long, he had to break some on account of unpredictable events. He was promptly given a pint for doing it in a safe and competent way. Apparently, had he done it messily or unsafely he'd have got a ding round the ear. Now that he's the one training new coxes, he does the same. It's costing him a lot.

This troper has to fetch carts from a parking lot. Unless a customer with a cart is elderly or obviously in need (i.e. has crutches or fifteen children), she won't offer to bring their cart to the coral. If, however, a customer begins to wheel the cart to the coral, she will gladly offer to take it for them. She's also fond of not getting a cart abandoned near the doorway and likes to count how many minutes and customers pass it by before someone takes it and restores her faith in humanity. (If it's an obvious fire hazard she'll take it.)

Simpler verson; one time, this troper's Modern Lit. teacher gave the class a test with very difficult questions that barely related to Literature as it was, with obscure details and questions of people's mass opinions. Turns out, he was solely testing two things: 1) if we bothered to actually attempt answering the questions at all, and 2) if people peeked at each other's papers.

This troper's headmaster once announced that he had left £10 and £20 notes around the school as a test of honesty, and that students returning them could expect house points - a pat on the head, in other words. What he didn't say is that they would also be given ''double'' the amount returned, i.e. £20 or £40. Any student who resigned themselves to doing the 'right thing' walked away twice as well off than if they hadn't.

This male troper was once asked:

Freind: Are you a lesbian?

Me: Yes

Freind: You pass.

My English class in high school were once given one of these, to test our analytical and observational skills. We were split into groups and given a sheet of paper detailing the dangers of a certain chemical, and the outrage that this chemical was till being used despite how many deaths and other destructions were caused by it. We were given the task of writing up a debate answer as to why this chemical should be banned. I was the only one to point out to their group that this task was ridiculous for one big reason: The chemical was Dihydrogen Monoxide...aka, water. The use of it's scientific name had thrown everyone off, meaning that everyone had been arguing as to ''why we should ban water''. For once in my life, my team actually listened to me and were happy that I was on their team. The exercise then lost the point and my epic win was degraded when my team started warning all their friends on the other teams not to write anything, and I wasn't given the credit for telling them this...