He was right. The final exam was verbatim the practice exam given at the end of the book. As luck would have it, I had discovered the practice exams a week earlier. Once I realized they were identical to the final, I literally copied the answers and handed it in. It was a 3 hour exam and half the class was done in 15 minutes.
Not everyone was there on time, some students were going to drop & add the class and most people weren't paying attention.
He casually joked for a couple minutes then settled down to get started.
There was never another hint.
When the final came, each question was verbatim from homework problems that were not assigned.
At the end it told you to ignore all previous questions and just do this one.
2nd favourite exam question after an economics multiple choice exam where we had to calculate the probability of passing the exam just by guessing.
I finished 2nd in my high school class (humble brag) because my best friend cheated (and got a zero) for an important biology term paper.
Story:
- My friend hated biology and he decided he would save time by submitting his older brother's bio term paper as his (his brother was 4 years older).
- A month after we handed in our term papers, the bio teacher asks my friend to step into his office, whereupon he shows him a copy of his brother's term paper. Big fat zero.
- It dinged my friend just enough that (even though he was more talented) he finished 3rd in the class.
- I ended up getting a tuition waiver to our state university (where we both went).
That laziness cost him about $10K in tuition (in 1980s dollars).
edit: the person who finished 1st in our class went to Yale. She was more talented than both of us combined.
I imagine there's a somewhat similar type of questions for non-CS disciplines (same case description, different key clue, hence different answer).
I had the most fun with multiple choice tests. I took the average A,B,C and D answers from previous tests. The teacher not paranoid would have a lot of B, slightly less A and C and below average D answers. The paranoid teacher would have perfect distribution. The supper paranoid used some kind of RNG which also comes in patterns.
One of each type came to ask me how I did it at the end. The last one was funniest. He had one test with a trick question that everyone got wrong. It just didn't have enough C. One of my answers was more likely wrong than right. I had to go over the A,B,D answer candidates a few times. Reduced the list to 3 potential trick questions. Figured out that 2 of them were correct. Don't ask me why but the remaining one must have been C.
He explained how over his [long] career he started out with to few D answers. I name the other teachers still doing that. He then went for the perfect distribution. I name the teachers still doing that. And now he thought he had the perfect formula. How am I suppose to fix this?? He asked. I'm like, I'm not doing your homework but I do foresee a very interesting meeting with the other teachers.
edit: I did study but cheating was just to much fun. When they switched to tests on computers I made a good bit of money as administrator. I swapped some of the answers around so that the wrong answer was right and everyone got poor grades. They would purchase the list of correct answers from me. Then after they aced it I would reduce their grade to something sensible for the student. When they protested I told them that they paid for answers not for grades. Grades are very expensive as -hey- they could potentially ruin this good thing I got going here!
If so, this is some real unethical and criminal behavior.
But I'm inclined to think it's all made up considering the first part of the comment seems to imply that you were doing well on tests simply by guessing the answers based an A,B,C,D distribution. Which is silly as the best you are going to do with that strategy is maybe get a slight hint for a few of the more difficult questions.
They got many answers wrong on the test but I adjusted their grades later. The grades do have to be credible for the show to continue.
> and then charging people money to get the rigged answers for the tests so they could pass?
People who didn't bother to study purchased the answers but if they always had low grades they would forever have low grades.
> If so, this is some real unethical and criminal behavior.
The only thing that really bothered me was this: Modifying the log files left a log entry with a terminal number in the log. I provided the teaches with a fair clue by changing the test answers and indeed eventually they smelled a rat. The cat and mouse game couldn't go on forever, eventually they would figure it out. I picked a scapegoat, a girl who couldn't hurt a fly. It couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
The teachers ganged up around her pointed and shouted then suspended her for a week.
I thought they acted ridiculous so I erased everything from the server and arranged for backups to be formatted when attached.
A few years later I ran into her and apologized but she didn't recall the event.
The teachers were very happy to return to paper based tests.
> unethical and criminal behavior
Ah yes, was I ever that young? We got computers in school and all we were allowed to do was tests. I assure you I've learned quite a lot. For example: Backups should have write protect implemented in hardware. Who in their right mind....
Oral examination is way superior but you need a healthy “students to prof” ratio for that
I felt like I was BSing my entire oral exam but got an A.
I was never the same after that course. 10 hours a day of logical homework fundamentally changed how I thought.
To this day I still cringe when people use phrases like everyone or all without actually meaning the set of everyone in existence.
As a maths lecturer once said: some of the problems will be similar with some of the numbers changed. Pi, however, will remain the same. ;)
It's nice when you find someone trying to improve there love life when the honeymoon phase is over and the somewhat crushing reality of her/him shortcomings come to the surface.
A young man went back to visit his old economics professor, under whom he had studied many years earlier. He took a look at the final exam the professor was preparing to give the students. He said, "Professor, this exam is identical to the one you gave us year ago!"
The professor replied, "That's okay, all the answers have changed."
The term is "dynamic storage allocation." We're talking about something so old I'm afraid I can't explain beyond that. I am a mere programmer and I don't wear a lab coat.
A buddy of mine had a copy and I took the class for an easy A. The only gotcha is that you had to be physically present and give him advance notice of you were to be out.
My EM theory second year was quite tricky
It was 60 questions in 180 seconds. No hard calculations, just stuff you were an embarrassment to the prof if you passed EM and didn’t know.
He gave it right before break (3 hour class). I got a 96 first attempt. Next highest grade was a 30. He said I could leave as the remainder of class was to go over the test. I literally strutted out and said I was going to have a cold beer. Good times.
Do you have a scar on your eyebrow?
In most cases, somebody just doing the obvious thing at the beginning of the book would have left nothing to write about in the rest. So, they just didn't do that thing.
Didn't that defeat the purpose of the critical thinking course?
The cold in the room seemed to deepen. “A sixth-year Gryffindor cast a curse at one of my more promising students, a sixth-year Slytherin.”
Harry swallowed. “What...sort of curse?”
And the fury on Professor Quirrell’s face was no longer contained. “Why bother to ask an unimportant question like that, Mr Potter? Our friend the sixth-year Gryffindor did not think it was important!”
“Are you serious?” Harry said before he could stop himself.
“No, I’m in a terrible mood today for no particular reason. Yes I’m serious, you fool! He didn’t know. He actually didn’t know. I didn’t believe it until the Aurors confirmed it under Veritaserum. He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.”
“You don’t mean,” Harry said, “that he was mistaken about what it did, that he somehow read the wrong spell description—”
“All he knew was that it was meant to be directed at an enemy. He knew that was all he knew.”
And that had been enough to cast the spell. “I do not understand how anything with that small a brain could walk upright.”
“Indeed, Mr Potter,” said Professor Quirrell.
There was a pause. Professor Quirrell leaned forward and picked up the silver inkwell from his desk, turning it around in his hands, staring at it as though wondering how he could go about torturing an inkwell to death.
“Was the sixth-year Slytherin seriously hurt?” said Harry.
“Yes.”
“Was the sixth-year Gryffindor raised by Muggles?”
“Yes.”
“Is Dumbledore refusing to expel him because the poor boy didn’t know?”
Professor Quirrell’s hands whitened on the inkwell. “Do you have a point, Mr Potter, or are you just stating the obvious?”
“Professor Quirrell,” said Harry gravely, “all the Muggle-raised students in Hogwarts need a safety lecture in which they are told the things so ridiculously obvious that no wizardborn would ever think to mention them. Don’t cast curses if you don’t know what they do, if you discover something dangerous don’t tell the world about it, don’t brew high-level potions without supervision in a bathroom, the reason why there are underage magic laws, all the basics.”
And when Harry had offered that hypothesis, Draco had claimed that he could remember a story - Harry hoped to Cthulhu that this one story was just a fairy tale, it had that ring to it, but there was a story - about Salazar Slytherin sending a brave young viper on a mission to gather information from other snakes.
If any snake a Parselmouth had talked to, could make other snakes self-aware by talking to them, then...
Then...
Harry didn't even know why his mind was going all "then... then..." when he knew perfectly well how the exponential progression would work, it was just the sheer moral horror of it that was blowing his mind.
And what if someone had invented a spell like that to talk to cows?
What if there were Poultrymouths?
Describing it as a Harry Potter fanfic is technically accurate but really doesn't do it justice. It's basically a story of what would happen if an extremely smart, educated and technically minded person would do if put into the role of Harry Potter.
Just don’t actually think about it too deeply or the entire premise falls apart. The world is 100% operating on the rule of cool, and that's ok.
> The author is practically screaming “wouldn’t it be lazy that Harry’s darkside is because he is a horcrux?”
This is completely backwards. Eliezer goes to great lengths to put big clues all over the place that Harry is not a normal 11–year old, with the intent that the reader will _notice_ that something is wrong and try to figure out what it could be. Yes, “Harry is a Horcrux” might feel like an anticlimax, or even a cliche, because that’s how the original books went. But you’re supposed to look even deeper and realize what a horcrux really is. In order to work, a Horcrux has to preserve a copy of the caster’s memories, personality, intentions, etc. What really happened that night in Godric’s Hollow is that Voldemort copied his own memories and personality into the brain of an infant named Harry Potter.
I think it is fair to say that Eliezer is treating this as much like a Fair–Play Mystery as he can, so that it is possible for the user to make correct predictions about the end of the story. Not everyone likes this type of story, but for those who do the game of putting the book down at a certain point so that you can puzzle out the murderer’s identity is a big part of the draw. The “rules” of the Fair–Play Mystery are there to ensure that the author remembers to actually make all the clues available to the reader, that it isn’t always just the butler, etc.
To that end, he has several important scenes that examine the consequences of erasing memories, or adding new ones. The most blatant is when Harry is training with Mr Bester, who has all memory of the training erased after each session. As a result, Mr Bester ends up asking the same questions over and over, and being surprised and troubled by the same revelations each time he reads Harry’s mind. And then of course there is Rita Skeeter, and later Hermione, to hammer the lesson home.
[...]
> I only read 5-6 chapters
So you didn't read it.
As others have mentioned, the first couple of chapters are definitely not the best. But yeah, the book isn't for everyone.
"So I wonder- is this story ACTUALLY teaching people things? Or is it just a way for people who already know some of the material to feel superior to Hariezer’s many foils?"
Actually that's exactly what rubs me wrong about the entire "rationalist community". A lot of it is convoluted ways for people to congratulate themselves how much smarter than everyone else they are.
Especially the first few chapters, because there were more attempts at science explanation in HPMOR's initial chapters.
Overall, I would recommend to not give up in the first chapters.
I mean, it wasn't my first experience with the university prioritizing profit over helping students, but it was definitely emblematic.
Most of us figured out that we could get along fine not having the textbook in the first couple of weeks of class. But ultimately, the university was out to actively sabotage the used textbook market. The only source of used books was online. So I never got to experience this community of used book students.
Something about paying the source for licensing and distribution was the reason given.
Except my political science prof. So I just dropped the course. Fuck him and his unironic bowtie.
At any rate it turns out the English printing is so rare not only can it not be found on Libgen - the few copies online are selling for hundreds of dollars (which I certainly would not have paid for it). So not only did I luck into a paper fortune (I suspect this is a rather illiquid market - plus I had to go through and fix a bunch of typos by hand, so much for the Soviet STEM educational complex) the kids _definitely_ couldn’t find this on the Internet.
Same as good class hand notes from students, that get (or used to get) photocopied and handed down through the years to new students...
As I interpreted their story, the professor had a habit of asking questions and then answering them himself, if nobody offered an answer. Students wrote down those answers in the margins of the book.
Over time, the book collected a lot of these notes from different students.
From the wiki page: `Harry finds an old potions textbook, once belonging to "The Half-Blood Prince", an individual who wrote numerous spells and tips in the book. Harry, using the tips in the book, excels in Potions class, winning a bottle of Felix Felicis, or "Liquid Luck".`
> I really wanted to keep it for posterity