Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (55 page)

“The Daughter’s Letter from College”

W
hen I was a university president, trying to deal with campus protests against the war in Vietnam, building a law school and a medical school and three community colleges, handling several budget crises a year, serving as a defendant in twenty lawsuits at a time, and even having to worry about three assassination threats, it was a condition of survival to take the longer and the wider view. On one particularly noisy day a kind and perceptive friend handed me a letter sent by an American college girl to her parents.

From the foreword to Harlan Cleveland’s 1985 book
The Knowledge Executive: Leadership in an Information Society.
While not precisely a legend, this anonymous letter in several variations has circulated on many college and university campuses since at least the mid-1960s. Cleveland’s version is somewhat sanitized and much shorter and less detailed than most texts. It omits the class-based or racist elements usually found in the letter. For example, the daughter may describe her new fiancé as of “a different race and religion than ours,” or even as the son of “an important gunbearer in the village in Africa from which he comes.” Other texts mention that the daughter has been diagnosed with syphilis as well as being pregnant, or that the fiancé cannot marry her until his “minor infection” allows him to pass the state’s blood test. The photocopied sheets upon which the letters are distributed are often titled “Perspective—writer unknown.”

“The Barometer Problem”

I
heard this story while attending San Jose State University in 1975. One of the questions on a physics final exam asked the students to measure the height of a building using a barometer. Not having studied the chapter on pressure changes with altitude, one student thought for a moment and then wrote: “Take the barometer to the top of the building to be measured. Throw it off. Using a stopwatch, time its descent and from that data compute the height of the building.”

The professor was not impressed, and graded the student’s response as incorrect. The student protested to the teacher and was reluctantly given another chance to answer the question.

The second time he wrote, “Take the barometer to the basement of the building to be measured. Find the building superintendent or manager, and tell him you will give him the barometer if he tells you the correct height of the building.”

It wasn’t said whether the professor was impressed with this second response.

Sent to me in 1989 by Steve Butler of San Clemente, California. If the professor had failed to be impressed by the student’s second effort, he might have liked one of the other “wrong answers” sometimes mentioned in this story. These alternate solutions involve lowering the barometer from the roof on a rope and measuring the rope, suspending the barometer on a string as a pendulum and calculating the height based on the pendulum’s swing, measuring the shadows of the barometer and the building from the same base and calculating the height, or measuring the side of the building in units of “one barometer” as the student climbs the steps from bottom to top. College students tend to circulate this story in order to illustrate the arbitrary nature of testing, while faculty members may tell the story to demonstrate the possibilities of creative thinking.

“Term Paper Trickery”

I
n 1984 when I was a senior at Regis Jesuit High School in Denver my English teacher was a faculty member from the associated Regis College. On the first day he felt compelled to warn us about plagiarism, and he told us the following story, which we all believed to be true, as I assumed the teacher himself did.

He said there was a teacher who had an introductory college English class similar to the one we were in. This teacher gave the class a term paper assignment, and when the papers were graded and being returned to the class he asked to see one of the students after class. This particular student had bought a term paper through the mail, and then had submitted it as his own.

After class the teacher told the student flat out that he had plagiarized the paper. The student instinctively denied it, but the teacher insisted, and eventually the student admitted the truth and asked how the teacher had known that he had copied it.

The teacher replied, “Because it is a chapter out of my own master’s thesis.”

A grading story that was told as true at my high school in Oakland, California, in 1957–58. There was a legend about one of our biology teachers, that he never read the middle of a paper, only the beginning and the end. Supposedly, one student a few years ahead of my class had put the theory to the test by turning in a biology paper with a brilliant beginning, a fantastic ending, and the Gettysburg Address in the middle. It was graded F, with the comment, “Ha, ha; I do too read the middle part.”

Stories of resubmitted term papers—inevitably recognized by the instructors—are common on college and high school campuses, even more so in these days of Internet sources of research papers. The first example above was sent to me by Matthew S. Christensen of Durham, North Carolina, in 1990. Variations on the theme include stories in which the paper receives a high grade, despite the teacher’s awareness that it was not original, since, as he comments, “I like this paper better every time I read it,” or “I got only a B-minus when I wrote this twenty years ago, but I thought it deserved an A.” The second term paper story above was sent to me by Melanie Nickel of San Diego, California, in 1991. The student’s attempted trickery represents what I call the “Gotcha!” ploy: the writer inserts a garbled sentence, a repeated paragraph, a meaningless footnote, or an upside-down page just to check whether his or her paper is actually read in full by the teacher. When I was editor of an academic journal some years ago I received a few manuscripts with one page upside down; my practice was to reverse a different page before mailing back a rejected manuscript.

“The Bird Foot Exam”

I
t seems that this college student needed a small two-hour course to fill out his schedule. The only one that fit was in Wildlife Zoology. He had some reservations, as he heard the course was tough and the teacher a bit different. But it seemed like the only choice, so he signed up.

After one week and one chapter the professor had a test for the class. He passed it out, and it was a sheet of paper divided into squares and in each square was a carefully drawn picture of some bird legs. Not bodies, not feet—just different bird’s legs. The test simply asked them to identify the birds from the pictures of their legs.

Well, he was absolutely floored. He didn’t have a clue. The student sat and stared at the test and got madder and madder. Finally, reaching the boiling point, he stomped up to the front of the classroom and threw the test on the teacher’s desk and exclaimed, “This is the worst test I have ever seen, and this is the dumbest course I have ever taken.”

The teacher picked up the paper, saw that the student hadn’t even put his name on the paper, and said, “By the way, young man, what’s your name?” At this the student bent over, pulled up his pants, revealed his legs and said, “You identify me.”

Usually in this story the test
does
reveal the birds’ feet, sometimes using stuffed birds lined up under little bags rather than drawings. This example is from
Parables, etc.: A Monthly Resource Letter for Pastors/Teacher/Speakers,
vol. 4, no. 11, January 1985. An alternate punch line is “You tell me prof!” The “What’s your name” theme also appears in the next story, yet another student commentary on the supposed arbitrary nature of college testing and grading.

“Do You Know Who I Am?”

T
o the Editor: As an undergraduate studying folklore at Harvard-Radcliffe 10 years ago, I was naturally interested in tales of student excuses, true or untrue. To those you report in “Beyond ‘Dog Ate My Homework’” (Education page, April 28), I add [this] from my informal fieldwork:

(1) During an exam, a proctor sees one student who is obviously cheating. When the exam is over and the students hand in their blue books, the proctor pulls the cheater aside: “I’ll take that book, please. I saw you cheating.”

The student stares the proctor right in the eye: “Cheating? I? Have you
any
idea who I am?” “No,” says the proctor. “Good!” says the student—and grabs a stack of blue books, throws them into the air with his own and runs from the room….

From a letter to the editor of the
New York Times
by Ellen Schorr of New York City, published on May 14, 1993. Other versions of “Do You Know…” describe the officious proctor refusing to accept an examination paper because the student did not stop writing immediately when time was called. The clever student may simply stick his blue book into the pile of look-alike books, or, if the blue books are thrown in the air, the time may be just before winter vacation, and the student says “Merry Christmas, Prof.!” before waltzing out of the room, free and clear. Stephen G. Bates of Cambridge, Massachusetts, wrote me in 1989 saying that his father told a variation of this academic legend 25 years earlier, in which a young assistant professor complained to a woman next to him at a University of Chicago reception about President Hutchins’s interminable faculty meetings. The woman asked, “Do you know who I am? I am Mrs. Robert Hutchins.” The faculty member replied, “Do you know who
I
am?” and, of course, she did not. Comedian Buddy Hackett, among others, has told the military variation of the story in which a saucy private working in the motor pool inadvertently insults a general who has called to reserve a car. The general, infuriated, asks “Do you know who this is?” General so and so, of course. “Do you know who
this
is?” asks the private, and the rest is folklore.

“Tricky Q & A”

A
friend in Dayton, Ohio, told me a story that he had heard at work. His friend had heard it from another friend who swore it was true. There were these two seniors at Stanford University taking a chemistry class from a rather witty teacher named Professor Bonk. Students even called his popular class “Bonk-istry.” The night before the final exam these two seniors on a lark decided to go to Lake Tahoe and gamble. Well, the worst happened, and they slept through their chemistry final exam the next day.

So they decided to tell Professor Bonk that they missed the class because they were out of town the night before, and while driving to the exam that day their car had a flat tire. Prof. Bonk took pity and scheduled them a make-up exam the next day.

The two students were administered the make-up exam in separate rooms. The first section of the test was simple chemistry true/false worth 10% of the test score. The second section was an essay worth 90% of the test, and the question was “Which tire was flat?”

I
first heard this story at Oxford 1983 when I was studying for my “A” levels (entrance exam). Later at the University of Kent as an undergraduate, I heard it a couple more times.

A young woman, setting her sights on entrance into Oxford as an undergraduate, takes the Oxbridge exam after her “A” levels. This is considered to be the most difficult entrance exam in the Western world.