Bold Test Answers That Delivered Mixed Results

Eric Lund

Mar 11, 2022 1:00 PM EST

Tests suck. Having to smoosh a bunch of information into your brain just to spew it back out onto a sheet of paper has hardly ever felt like an effective way to actually learn something. Most of us learn by doing things anyway, and we'd be hard-pressed to remember any of the stuff we memorized in sixth grade just to get through a pop quiz. Sure, we knew all the countries in Asia at one point, but we keep forgetting Burma isn't a thing anymore, and it's just noise after that.

We never want to relive it again. That moment of tenseness when you look down at an empty sheet of paper, and the answer is just on the tip of your tongue. The clock is coming up on an hour and your pencil is sliding our of your hand, which is cramping from having just written two pages on the World War 2, the answer you gave you're pretty sure was corrupted by an episode of Star Trek. Who knows, maybe "the two big things that ended the war in the East" were in fact Kirk and Spock.

That's why it's so cathartic to see kids who were either clever, or just panicked and came up with whatever they could.