Chapter 231.

Chapter 231. Confrontation Before the Valentine’s Day School Dance. (3/4)

The stress I felt was unbearable when I recalled what my AP Biology course experience entailed. I guess I could help her out there too though. The teacher was pretty lazy and had everyone do fifty-question long multiple-choice tests every two or three days. Why would I say they were lazy when they gave such long tests every two to three days?

Well, I’d cracked the system. I knew exactly how the teacher handled that course. They used a question bank from a textbook I found, all available online on day one, with a simple google search of a question on the mock test the teacher gave us for practice. The teacher didn’t even change the wording of the questions and simply copied and pasted everything word for word. The most the teacher did was scramble the order of the questions and answers. 

All you had to do was practice those questions in advance or just straight up memorize the answers and you’d be set. There were a lot of tricks you could use to memorize them too. For example, the easiest way was to remember the first few words in the correct answer and ensure it was a unique sequence of words. You could also come up with acronyms for the sequence of words, just remembering the first letter of each word was enough. 

Another method was to analyze the number patterns for questions you had to order things in by using both probability and grasping the psychology used by the question maker in the formulation of the multiple-choice answers. 

Oftentimes, if you understood the probabilistic nature of the question and psychology used in answer creation, you could immediately look at the answers first for sequential order questions in biology and figure out which order was most likely the correct one. At the very least, you could rule out which ones weren’t the correct order. You’d be working backward without even reading the question by starting with the answers.

The first and last in the ordered sequence were what you’d figure out right away using probability. You’d narrow it down and then figure out the middle sequence using a similar method. These sorts of analytic methods were honestly far easier than bothering to memorize the absurd amount of content in that stupidly thick textbook we were expected to read. 

It was also much better than wasting time on what could be a lengthy question to read that might take up a lot of time to sort through when you were on an already tight deadline to finish the test. Getting stuck on a single question could entirely throw you off pace and result in not finishing the test in the allotted time. It was best to skip those lengthy ones and come back to them later if you really had no idea of the answer.

Aside from order questions, there were all of the above multiple-choice questions as well. Typically, if you remembered the first word in two or three of the answers, you would be able to remember whether it was a question with all of the above as an answer. Another technique was to look at the length of each answer. If all the answers were quite long, more likely than not, the answer would be all of the above. When questions came with only two options being correct, it was easier to just remember the two that were correct.

Though having the practice bank questions in hand made things significantly easier, there were some answers in the practice bank questions that were just wrong, so you had to be careful. If you chose the answer that was wrong based on the answer listed in the practice bank, but many others chose the right answer and pointed out the answer they were graded as incorrect was actually the correct one, the teacher would catch on that something fishy was up. But since I already knew which ones they were, and I specifically remembered those questions the best, I just needed to make the corrections when helping Alicia study.

When you scored near perfect to perfect on all those tests, it was especially eye-catching if you made such a blunder.

For tests in my AP Biology class, the teacher made it so if you got 45/50 on the test, it would be counted as full marks. If you got higher, the teacher counted those as bonus marks. 

It was only after around thirty out of what should have been fifty multiple-choice tests that the teacher finally changed things up. They abruptly switched to long answer questions instead. But luckily for me, it turned out to be much easier to predict the questions that would show up on tests when the teacher personally made the long answer questions as the questions were finally the things the teacher actually emphasized in class. They were no longer unpredictable complete nonsense questions that came out of left field like those shitty multiple-choice questions.

If you’d racked up enough bonus marks by the time the teacher switched to long answer questions, even if your grades dropped a little on long answer questions, you could still easily finish the course with 100% in the course.

Honestly though, what was that teacher even thinking with those terrible tests? From the very beginning, the multiple-choice questions had all been unreasonable. In a lot of instances, you wouldn’t find the answer by simply reading the textbook like you would with the long answer questions they came up with on their own. Fifty questions in fifty minutes were also absurd with the difficulty of those questions. The wording was always confusing and downright stupid.

For the long answer questions the teacher made on their own, all you had to do was find each important topic the teacher put emphasis on during class in the textbook, jot down the key, point-form notes on it, and memorize them. As for the printouts for the PowerPoint slides the teacher prepared and provided, they were dog shit as far as I could tell and you’d fail if you relied on them. 

If you properly learned the improved key points you noted down and identified from the textbook on your own and cross-referenced them with what the teacher elaborated on in class as a reference, you could easily predict the questions that showed up on their tests. As such, this made the long answer questions a breeze.

The multiple-choice questions hadn’t been anywhere near as easy to cope with. Long answers, on the other hand, were open to interpretation and you could even bullshit your way through questions. Bullshitting just so happened to be one of my areas of expertise after all. One time I bullshitted an answer for a topic I somehow completely overlooked. The teacher gave me the benefit of the doubt and gave me full marks just because he thought I knew what I was talking about.

If the teacher felt you knew what you were talking about, then it was all good. The introduction of tests with strictly long answer questions provided another great benefit in that it reduced the frequency of those outrageous tests we did every two or three days. To me, they’d been a godsend in a way. It was less taxing for me to do this than to go through the hundred or more multiple-choice questions every two to three days where only fifty were used.

When I thought about it now though, was the teacher truly lazy? If I thought about it from an adult perspective, perhaps he was using a roundabout approach to try and teach skills that could not be openly taught. That teacher talked about academic dishonesty and condemned it on the surface, but was there more to it? 

Had there actually been other lessons that you’d only uncover if you read between the lines?

Perhaps what he was truly teaching was the hidden psychology of multiple-choice tests. For us to understand the process and formulation rather than the content matter. Such a skill stretched far beyond a single course and could be used in many more.

She was conditioning students for multiple-choice questions. To be able to not fold under pressure. To manage time. To know how to approach different types of questions. When to skip them and come back to them. How to crack the system. How to cheat in a manner where you’re not caught.

To develop mental tricks and schemes to memorize things. Which served as a precursor ability for the long answer questions. Hold on, the AP exam had both multiple choice and long answer questions. Didn't that mean it was inevitable for us to also need to handle those sorts of questions? Then the teacher had lied from the very beginning about all of the tests being multiple choice. The reason the teacher gave for changing the test style was on suspicions of academic dishonesty.

Was that really the case though? No… she probably knew from early on and even predicted it would happen. But that teacher just didn’t care and let it go on for thirty tests. It was a form of Spartan training.

What the hell? That teacher wasn’t simply lazy, they were actually just a scammer! They must have known everything from the beginning! Damn it! I was such a naive kid back then for thinking I was clever! That teacher definitely played us kids for fools. 

Somehow… I wanted to cause trouble for that teacher. However… what that teacher taught was still very valuable despite how unorthodox it was.

Haaaaah. Whatever.

In the end, I’d only taken AP Biology to say I could do it. I never intended to do anything related to biology, so it didn’t even matter if I got a good grade in it or cheated the system. I simply did it for some more scholarship money. 

AP provided scholarship money if you completed a certain number of AP courses and did well in them. 

People would often tell you that you were only cheating yourself by cheating, that teacher was no different, but were you really cheating yourself when what you were cheating in would never have any impact on what you were going to do in life? The answer to that question was a resounding no.

Anyway, it was the system's fault for being set up in a way where it was too easy to cheat. Design a better system if you really don’t want people to cheat. As for the exam at the end which our teacher had no control over the questions, I still got a five on the exam at the end regardless, the best result. So had I cheated myself? No. So, bite me.

If I didn’t cheat, I wouldn’t have survived that hellish time in my life with both work and volunteering as the added cherry on top.