The Sum Of All Fears

What do you do when you are sitting in an examination hall supposed to be attempting a paper which is as unfamiliar to you as would a script in an alien language be? This is what happened to me a few days back when I had to face the inevitable turmoil of having to attend the MLA quiz. Attended the class after about a month or so and was naturally oblivious as to what was going on presently. Hope my experience helps in getting students like me out of such knotty situations.

So here goes the situation:
You are not expected to raise your head and glance around if you are to retain your, so-to-seem *illusory* dignity and self-respect. Even if you give it a damn, you'd atleast not want to come to the limelight for an embarrasing deed of yours.
You cannot simply sit and blankly stare at the paper and do nothing as in that case you would immediately catch the attention of the Invigilator(who quite incidentally also happens to be your Instructor for the course), who is either just on your right or on your left everytime you look out for him.
You cannot just scribble anything that comes to your mind as that would leave a negative impression on the Examiner(who to confirm your worst fears is once again that same Instructor of the course) while evaluating the paper.
Oh Yes! even the last possible sane thing that you are now thinking of is also sealed. What the hell do you think would be discussed behind your back the moment you leave the room? And more importantly the Invigilator having nothing better to do would surely prefer browsing through your answer script once you have left, as all Invigilators do, just to have some sort of an Entertainment while he's catering to the undebatably most boring job that atleast I can ever think of. Needless to say, he would be least entertained by your answer script as you need to have some text in ink which were supposed to be solutions according to you, the fact remains, you need to have 'some matter' whatsoever. The devoid of which could irritate him to the extent that he makes a mental note of you.

So now you are in a stale-mate condition wherein any move of yours could go against you. You can't look around, you can't sit idle, you can't scribble bullshit and neither can you call it a day. What do you do???

Now this is what I propose out of my experience. The key to the whole game is to play it smart. The whole idea is to remain inconspicuous to the Invigilator. True! there are constraints but the point to ponder upon is do they still remain a constraint when considered collectively? To be more apt, the constraints, if rephrased more intelligently would directly lead us to the solution.
Lets look at them once again.

You cannot look around: Is it true? If you look around once will you catch the attention of the Invigilator? Not necessarily. Twice? I don't think so. Thrice? Now Now don't stretch your luck too much!

This shows the constraint is not a constraint in entirety. It does have certain allowances. These are the allowances that a shrewd student should be able to bank upon.

Lets re-list the constraints in a more precise manner.

• You cannot look around - all the time.
• You cannot sit idle - all the time.
• You cannot scribble meaninglessly - for all the questions.
• You cannot be the first one to leave the room.

See the way out now? Its as simple as that. Just juggle with your options in a manner which does not call for attention. Look around for a while, sit and stare blankly at the paper for a while as if you are attempting - The Physics Olympiad, where immaculate concentration is the name of the game, you can also take the chances of scribbling something meaningless on the paper as long as you feel it is reasonably within the threshold limit of the Evaluator. This way you'll be able to pass away the time without grabbing the attention of the Invigilator. You are not constantly doing something weird to strike-out as a sore thumb out of the whole lot.

Finally arises the question of returning to the pavilion. As discussed earlier, you do not fancy the Invigilator to browse through your answer script once you have left the room and all the same you are eager to leave the hall as early as possible without catching attention. The best solution I propose is, wait until a couple of guys have submitted their paper and then leave exactly when someone gets up to submit his/her own and see to it that you are the first to hand it over to the Invigilator. This way two things are taken care of. Firstly you are not the first to leave the hall and secondly the chances for the Invigilator to have a look at your paper are quite bleak as the person who has got up to submit his/her paper will have submitted it immediately after yours. So now that paper would be at the top of the sheaf(fingers crossed!).

This is precisely what I had done to escape the attrocities of 'having-to-do-absolutely-nothing'. That was the first time I realized doing 'absolutely nothing' is a tiresome job in itself. And once you engage yourself in doing so you can no more be attributed of doing "Nothing". Infact what you are doing is "to do Nothing" which if you believe me is a more burdensome job than to score the highest in the paper(in this case it was 18/20, scored by my dear friend Blast, who quite coincidentally was sitting right in front of me. This made me realize I wasn't doing my job right orelse the look-around part might have taken care of my plight.)

You must have realized the relevance of the title by now. The proposal that I have put forward is to pool up all the minute Fears that crosses one's mind into one large heap and then manipulate them to your own advantage. So the next time you attend an examination just for the sake of attending it and are in more-or-less the same situation as I was in, do not forget to try and implement my tried-and-tested method of "The Sum Of All Fears".

ALL THE BEST!!!