[Sam Leopold]

When I was a freshman at Caltech, the upperclassmen were still passing around tales of the midterm from the Math 2c course in the spring of '97 (which got mothballed out of the core curriculum right before my class arrived).  The professor was some Russian guy whose name I don't remember, and even if I did I'm not sure I would want to divulge it here.  By good fortune, I missed that trial by 3 years, for which the median score was not much higher than 10%.  Single-digit scores were not uncommon, and a few poor souls ended up with a score of 0.  Some time in the fall quarter '98 that midterm was parodied in the now-defunct "literary journal" of Ruddock House* known as the BFD, which featured mock questions such as "Matt is sitting on a Rubbermaid step stool and lets out a fart.  Calculate the expected duration of the fart.  (In other words, calculate the number of seconds for which the, er, the, er, er, the fart will last.)"

* Recently renamed to Venerable House, for Grant Venerable, the first African-American graduate of Caltech in 1932, after the Ruddock fellow turned out to have expressed some, ahem, insensitive attitudes in his past.  During my 20th year reunion, I was on campus and present for the Venerable name unveiling.

[Sam Leopold]

When I was a freshman at Caltech, the upperclassmen were still passing around tales of the midterm from the Math 2c course in the spring of '97 (which got mothballed out of the core curriculum right before my class arrived).  The professor was some Russian guy whose name I don't remember, and even if I did I'm not sure I would want to divulge it here.  By good fortune, I missed that trial by 3 years, for which the median score was not much higher than 10%.  Single-digit scores were not uncommon, and a few poor souls ended up with a score of 0.  Some time in the fall quarter '98 that midterm was parodied in the now-defunct "literary journal" of Ruddock House* known as the BFD, which featured mock questions such as "Matt is sitting on a Rubbermaid step stool and lets out a fart.  Calculate the expected duration of the fart.  (In other words, calculate the number of seconds for which the, er, the, er, er, the fart will last.)"

* Recently renamed to Venerable House, for Grant Venerable, the first African-American graduate of Caltech in 1932, after the Ruddock fellow turned out to have expressed some, ahem, insensitive attitudes in his past.  During my 20th year reunion, I was on campus and present for the Venerable name unveiling.