OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN

Tomorrow, I will walk into an exam room and be bored out of my mind for two and a half hours. Yes, that’s right, I’m going to invigilate a second year mechanical engineering final exam. The course is Rigid Body Dynamics and I took it myself many, many moons ago. I really enjoyed the material. You get to draw a lot of diagrams and by the end, you do things like predict trajectories of flying objects (ie. missiles) or model the behaviour of impacts between rigid bodies (ie. a puck off the boards or glass).

Anyways, since the day I knew I was going to be a TA, I was looking forward to this. Ya see, for five straight years in undergrad, whenever I walked into a final examination room, I was the one doing the sweating. There would always be the TAs who made sure you weren’t cheating and who checked your ID. They looked bored out of their mind for most of the time. You couldn’t even ask them questions, because they usually weren’t the TAs for the course. I’d always think, “Man, I wonder what it’s like being in their shoes instead of sitting and squirming for hours on end?”

So now, I’m a TA and tomorrow I’ll get to see what it’s like. Am I still looking forward to it? To be honest… no. The damn exam is at 8:30am in the morning and I have to be there at 8am. I have my own AI exam to write the day after so I’ll be totally screwed up because of the early time. I go to bed usually around 4am now, so this is gonna throw a big wrench in the works.

I’ll probably be so out of it during the exam that people could cheat right in front of me and I wouldn’t notice. And seriously, how boring is it to watch people be nervous for two and a half hours? The space-time continuum must warp during exams because to the students, those hours will just fly by.

Invigilating an exam is something I probably will appreciate doing afterwards, but dude, 8am is early!

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