Collegiate Times

When you don’t really know on a test essay, you spread it on thick. You hope that, through the muck, your professor won’t catch wind of your actual ignorance.

In fact, once I did a whole essay on Chaucer’s story about chickens, and how the chickens actually represented a pent-up priest’s sexy yet sexist views about women.

That topic is really stupid. But in the scramble-and-scrawl of the test essay, an otherwise dumb idea suddenly seems like your golden ticket to passing the class.

But for me personally, no other form of exam outdoes the most dreaded of all test forms: true/false.

I feel like whoever writes true/false questions is the Dick Dastardly of testing, trying to foil you at every turn.

“True or False: Most fish have gills.” 

You can’t think of any fish that don’t have gills. But it might be a trick.

You panic. 

You know that there’s an exception to every rule, and maybe it’s just some weird cavefish that doesn’t like its picture taken.

Maybe they’re trying to see if you know that whales aren’t fish. So why didn’t they just ask you that in the first place?

And then you think about lungfish, but you’re pretty sure they have a set of gills too. So the lungfish settles it. You mark down “false” because all, not most, fish must have gills.

You get it wrong, and you hate fish a little after that.

But no matter whether it’s “multiple guess,” a heap of mental dung in essay form, or profanity-inducing true/false, the key to any test is to relax as much as you can.

Forget it. Push aside the fact that this test is worth 50 percent of your final grade. Don’t dwell on the fact you probably shouldn’t have watched all those reruns of “Full House” instead of studying. Just believe in your test-taking prowess.

Unless, of course, you just marked down the last nine answers as “B.” Then you might need to worry.

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A version of this article appeared in the Mar 19 issue of the Collegiate Times.