Combined with the stress of studying and the difficulty of the exams, finals week is the most dreaded time of the year for most Northwood students. Here are some stories from students about their exams gone wrong.
The All-Nighter
AP Physics isn’t a class you would typically want to start studying for the night before the test, but senior Alex Tan’s procrastinatory habits had other plans. While he should have been sleeping, Tan was chugging 5-hour Energy while cramming pages upon pages of formulas.
“You know that one scene in the Rap God music video where Eminem is hooked up to all the wires injecting lyrics into him,” Tan said. “I had Khan Academy videos on my laptop, Organic Chemistry Tutor on my monitor, a ton of notes in my right hand and the physics textbook in my left.”
Realizing the amount of material he had to cover, Tan decided to sacrifice studying for his history final to allocate all his remaining time to studying for Physics.
“You could hear my soul shatter into tiny pieces when I looked at the first page of that Physics final,” Tan said. “Try and imagine how I felt at the end of the day when I realized I did way better on my history final than the one I spent the whole night prepping for.”
Taco Bell Testing
Eating a week-old order of Taco Bell before final exams probably isn’t the best idea, but when you’re starving in the middle of the night, logic tends to fly out the window. Unfortunately for junior Joshua Lee, his rash actions caught up with him at the worst possible moment. A sudden wave of nausea hit him as he began his history exam.
“I sprinted all the way to the restroom and tried to get it out of my system as fast as possible,” Lee said. “Maybe it was because I was so panicked or that I ran too fast, but nothing happened. After like two minutes of trying, I think I decided to just wash it down with some water and hope for the best.”
After only a few minutes in class, Lee was forced to make another trip to the sink. Again, nothing. Lee’s cycle of nausea kept repeating until class ended.
“It was a nightmare,” Lee said. “Getting up and leaving the class every ten minutes combined with the stress of the actual test. At least the teacher was understanding and let me stay a few extra minutes after I explained what happened to make up for my lost time, but overall, it was still one of the worst experiences of my entire life.”
Calculated Failure
Forgetting something trivial like a pen or an eraser for your final exam normally shouldn’t be that big of a deal. However, forgetting a calculator for your math test might pose a significant risk. During his freshman year, senior Allen Wen frantically searched through his backpack for his calculator on the day of his Math 1 final but came up empty. Relying on his arithmetic skills, he decided to do all the math by hand.
As a new student, talking to a high school teacher can prove to be intimidating, and at times, asking for help may feel far scarier than taking a math test without a calculator.
“I honestly don’t know what I was thinking,” Wen said. “I saw all the other kids plugging numbers away in their calculators and thought, ‘Wait, if the teacher sees me not using a calculator, what if she thinks I’m cheating and I get expelled?’ Freshman me panicked and came up with an ingenious idea.”
Rather than finally accepting his fate and raising his hand to ask for a calculator, Wen decided his best bet was to draw a picture of a calculator on his desk and pretend it was real.
“I left around half of the questions blank on that test just because of how nervous I was that I would get ‘caught’ using a fake calculator,” Wen said. “It could also have been because I spent the last five minutes of the test erasing the evidence instead of double-checking my answers.”
