The Bad, the Ugly, and the Good

As a Cornell student, I am currently in the middle of the first round of spring semester prelims. Most recently, I took my differential equations prelim in Call Auditorium in Kennedy Hall. It was a lousy room for a prelim, and it got me thinking about my past exam room assignments.

The Bad

Goldwin Smith Hall – Chem 2150 – This was an auditorium in the basement of Goldwin Smith Hall, the English building.  There are several features that set this room apart from all the other windowless auditoriums I've taken exams in.  For one thing, we could hear the clock tower clearly every single time it chimed.  (At least if you didn't bring a watch, you’d be reminded of the time every fifteen minutes.)  For another, throughout the entire prelim, the ventilation system was making hissing and banging sounds that were vaguely reminiscent of a wrestling match going on in the ceiling.  Or something like that.

The Ugly

Call Auditorium, Kennedy Hall – Math 2930 – As soon as I saw that they were scheduling nine discussion sections in the same room for the first differential equations prelim, I was not excited.  We were assigned to Call Auditorium, which besides having more than five hundred seats for over two hundred students sitting every other seat, also has the same number of dysfunctional desks.  First off, the desks are the size of a sheet of paper, which makes it slightly ridiculously difficult to write, but I could deal with that, if the desks actually worked.  But they don’t.  If you don’t rest something heavy on one end of the desk, the very act of trying to write makes the desk fall over, causing you to have to dive for your things or sending everything crashing to the ground.  To add insult to injury, they also don’t have left-handed desks (at least not in any of the usual places).

The Good

Olin Hall – Engri 1120 – Honestly, this is the only room that I can say that I like taking prelims in.  It’s the only true classroom I've taken a test in and the site of both of my Intro to ChemE prelims and the final.  And it has actual tables. (How else were you supposed to have room for your binder of handouts, notebook, textbook, ruler, colored pencils, pencil, and exam?)  Smaller room, tables, that’s a win in my book.

Plus a couple bonus stories:

I showed up early to my first calculus prelim at Cornell, but the auditorium was already pretty full.  In fact, people were having trouble finding seats.  Everyone, including the TAs, was looking rather confused, but the TAs started passing out exams anyway.  Upon receiving their exam book, some people near the front must have asked what it was for, which is when things started to make more sense.  As it turns out, whoever was in charge of scheduling put two exams in the same room at the same time.  One was multivariable calculus.  The other was an ILR class.

Later that semester, for the same math class, we were scheduled to take the final in Barton Hall.  Usually, for prelims, large classes are split up, but it seems that everyone has to take the final in the same place.  One of the few rooms large enough to hold the five hundred or so students in multivariable was Barton Hall.  The reason Barton has that much space is not because it contains an extraordinarily large auditorium, but rather, an indoor track.  That’s right; it’s one of our athletic buildings.  Most of the floor space was covered with tables, but it was a surprisingly tame experience.  Even with five hundred other students, it was pretty quiet (all that space also swallows up sound) and the TAs were in charge of their own sections, so no one had to deal with more than around fifty students.  Main problem of the afternoon: finding my seat.