Test Faces

Proctoring exams is boring.  If you don't watch them, the students feel like they can push the boundaries.  In no time they'll sneak out pages of illicit notes, or act like you can't tell they're using their phones to search for answers or get help from someone else.  Yet it's not something I can entirely foist off on graduate students.  The lecture hall is too big, there are too many students, and the average graduate student is only slightly more aware of their surroundings than the infants they're supposed to be watching.

So, in the absence of anything better to do, you notice the different faces that students adopt while taking exams.  They range in an amusing spectrum centered around the one that most students have, that of the dutiful and busy face.  This is what you want, the student who knows they have no time to waste, this test is serious business, and so they had better get moving if they want to have a chance at finishing in time.

A little ways away from this norm is the angry face.  I doubt they do it consciously, but I have seen students who frown at their exams the whole way through.  It may be that this is simply what they look like when they're concentrating, but I suspect it's more that they see the test for what it is:  an adversary, and it is a battle they're not winning.  They look like they want to start arguing with the page in front of them, and it likely takes fair amount of restraint for them to not yell at the problems.  I'm sure these people are very pleasant to be around in day-to-day life.

On the other hand, you have the students, the all too common students, who might as well have been given a test written in Sanskrit.  They stare at the page, and you can see their brain has shut down.  These types come in two flavors, both characterized by their vacant stares, hoping that divine inspiration will hit them, or that the answers will magically materialize in front of them.  One stares at the test in front of them, not fully giving up, but their pencil sits limp in their hand.  The other stares off at the wall.  I think the latter is further gone, and probably is more likely to look at their peers' papers given the opportunity.

Then you have my personal favorite.  Take the angry student and the student of the vacant stare, mix them together and push them a little bit harder, and you have the imminent crier.  No student has full-out burst into tears during an exam in my experience, but I have seen plenty who are clearly using all of their mental and physical ability to hold in their tears until they leave the class.  They certainly aren't using any of their power to complete the exam.  These students tend to turn in their tests and almost run out of the room.  It is hard not to smile at them as they hand in their pathetic papers.

Then there is the one which is an endangered animal in my classroom, yet one I saw on this first calculus test.  I hope I misread it, but I believe I saw the endlessly irritating Miss Johnson give this face.  The face of someone who goes into a test expecting a challenge, as they should.  They look dutiful and serious at first, like the bulk of the students.  But then something will happen.  They'll flip through the test, look at the backs of the pages to see if they're missing anything, maybe even look around the class to see if anyone else is in on it, then scribble furiously, a smile creeping over them.  This is the look of someone who knows, or thinks they know, the material far better than they, or I for that matter, expected.

She indeed finished faster than anyone else in the class.  And there are only two kinds of people that finish tests early:  those that destroyed the test, and those that were destroyed by the test.

If she is the former rather than the latter, I am convinced she must have cheated.  If I can't prove it, or find how she did it, rest assured the very least that will happen in the future is a custom exam, just for her.