The Finals answer

From Terry:

THEREFORE, let’s get right to the FINAL EXAM EDITION of the Thursday Three!
Dr. Smith (soon to be deep in the grading of final exams himself) sends along the following for your consideration:

1. What was your luckiest experience with finals?
2. What was your worst experience?
3. Finally, do you have any recurring finals nightmares?

1. I'd prefer to think it was brains and skill, not luck. The truth is that there was an auditing final at 8 a.m. that I didn't start to study for until 7 a.m. I had several other, more pressing finals all in a row the previous day, and couldn't get around to studying for this one. The lucky part? This particular professor always took his multiple choice questions from the CPA review book - which had the answers in it. I just read through as many questions as I could in the fifty minutes I had, then went in and aced the exam. Good short term memory :^)

2. Test anxiety is not part of my genetic make up: by test time I either knew it or not, and worrying about it wouldn't help. So when I went in to take the CPA exam (back in the dark ages when you couldn't use calculators and it was a two and a half day exam), I was relaxed and ready to get it over with. It was watching my friends that was fun...I honestly thought a few were going to pass out. The only time I ever saw people more wound up over an exam was when I proctored an exam for foreign medical students hoping to get into the program at the Medical College of Wisconsin - I literally had to wrestle the pencil out of one guy's hand to get him to stop.

3. No finals nightmares, but a recurring dream about being late for class because I couldn't find it/no one would tell me where it was/I had no books. It is always terribly important that I get to class, and frustrating that I can't. I'm making progress though; the last time I had the dream, I was in a class; it was the one after that that I could not find. It seems to pop up whenever I'm feeling overwhelmed and lost.