From: chil@fraser.sfu.ca (Keith Lim)
Subject: Re: April Fools
Keywords: Lemur
Organization: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 11:38:21 GMT

hakari@lars.acc-admin.stolaf.edu (The Conformist Contrabass Clarinetist) writes:

>Last year in my backgrounds of lit class, the prof forgot about our final...
>Someone went to chase him down.  They found him about 20 min later, but he
>forgot to bring the finals with him.  We ended up with take-homes due the next
>week...

This reminds me of... [warning: long, boring story]

I was in a first-year economics class once, and on the day of the class's
final (which was in the evening), the prof. was nowhere to be found all day
(some students were upset; they wanted to ask last-minute questions.) About
ten minutes before the exam, someone went to ask the office, and found out
that the prof. hadn't even submitted a sample exam paper to the office. In
other words, no prof. and no master copy of any exam that could be copied
and distributed.

The prof. finally appeared about two minutes before the exam was due to 
begin, and, I swear, his face was a rather fetching shade of green. All he
could mutter (in a voice of despair) was, "I can't get the exam out of the 
computer!" 

Apparently, he had put the finishing touches on the exam that afternoon 
(typos, whitespace, other formatting like boldfacing, etc.), and when he
saved it, he got a disk full error, and the computer hung on him. Rebooting,
and deleting other files on the disk didn't help--the problem was in the
copy of the exam file itself. As far as I could figure, the file was
partially saved when the disk full error occured, and the program didn't
do any tidying up, leaving the disk copy of the file corrupted in some way.
No amount of freeing up space would allow the file to be saved properly,
neither would whatever text on the screen print hardcopy. Any missing text
that was retyped would not be saved onto disk. ("I've typed the last page
about four times already!")

Well, the prof. and the vice-principal (it was just in a small college,
and everyone from the janitors to the principal was pretty much on
familiar terms with everyone else--something I miss in this big, unfriendly
university--but I digress)...the prof. and the vice-principal (who knew a
little about computers) disappeared into an office to try and sort things
out while us students just milled around aimlessly or else sat down and
made use of the unexpected extra las-minute-revision time.

Some thirty minutes later, the vp appeared and announced that the exam was
postponed until the next day: "...really sorry. Go home now; there's no
point staying here anymore...."

Well, that would normally be not an unreasonable thing to ask of students,
given the unexpectedness and nature of the problem. The complication was
that three of the students scheduled to take the exam already had tickets
for a flight back to their homes the next day. In the morning. Early in the
morning.

The prof. and the vp, not surprisingly, are rather upset of this new
development. A hurried conference takes place. Well, things aren't that bad,
after all. In the half hour of hacking, they've managed to persuade the 
first two-thirds or so of the exam to print out. Run off three copies, and
those first three students can start doing the exam while everyone tries to
figure out how to get the last one-third to print out too (after it's typed
in *yet* again, of course.) Two hours or less to figure that out. Meanwhile,
the announcement is made that for the rest of the students, the exam would
be held the next day, afternoon.

Students start leaving. I happened to not be in any particular hurry to
leave. (I understood the subject material well, and was feeling quite
confident that I would do well; so I didn't feel the need to rush home and
do more last-minute revision. I *did* get a final grade of A+, yes A+, in
the course--but I'm getting ahead of myself in this story.) So I'm one of
the last few students still hanging around the college after about five to
ten minutes after the announcement of the postponed exam. The prof. appears
(looking somewhat calmer and a lot less greener than he did at his initial
appearance) and asks if anyone knows anything about computers.

Yes, that's right, yours truly is, at the point, the only student around
who knows things about computers (everyone else knows the right way to insert
a disk into a disk drive, and how to flip a power switch, and that's about 
it.) An invitation is extended to me to "see if [I] can do anything."

Complication (another one). I haven't written the exam yet, and am due to
write it the following day. So--how am I supposed to work on the file and
get it to save and print correctly if I can't very well see *any* of the
text in it?

First attempts to work around this problem weren't very useful. For example,
the prof. scrolled through the file until he hit the end-of-file. Then, he
scrolled the text off the screen until all that remained were a couple of
blank lines (which were just whitespace: question separators, the like) and
the no-more-lines indicator. Only then was I allowed to look at the screen.
Prof. points out the blank lines to me: "See, that's the end of the file as
it's saved on disk. This is not really the end of the exam; there should be
more, but it isn't here. Ummm...does this help? Can you tell what's gone
wrong from this?" (Gee, if I could, would I be in school? Don't you think
I'd be out making money as the master computer consultant genius wizard?)

Anyway, about all I could do was to try typing a few test lines, then try
various save options. Nothing worked. Any and all new lines I typed were
gone the next time the file was called up from disk. (My guess is that the
EOF character was somehow replaced bu a BitBucket character, and anything
new just went into it.) And the damn thing still would print properly
anyway, at least the page where the file abruptly ended wouldn't. (But the
previous, complete, pages did, and those were the ones the three students
were writing right at that moment.)

If I had Norton, or some disk editor program, I could have manually put in
an EOF character into the file, turning it back into a "normal", (albeit 
examwise-incomplete) file. Of course--of course!--I didn't have any such
program with me, and neither did anyone else. All I had to work with was
[spit] MS-DOS. And of course, I *still* couldn't look at the file itself
anyway. The only thing I could suggest was that anything that couldn't
be printed out be typed in again, *on a new disk*, *_one with lots of free
space on it._* [*_ and _* = italics *and* underlining :) ] "Sorry, but that
advice is the about the only help I can give, since I can't look at the file,
and don't have any disk tools anyway. Sorry."

And that's the story. Went home after that, did a little revision (just to
make sure I hadn't forgotten anything), came back the next day, wrote the
exam, and, yes, got an A+ for the course.  Boring epilogue. Whether the
difference between an A and an A+ was due to my attempt to help is something
I don't care about. I got an A+, that's all that's important. :)

-- 
  Keith_Lim@sfu.ca   Simon Fraser University, Burnaby B.C., V5A 1S6, Canada
  ** Hon Cog Sci  Min Psyc  Senate  URC  FARSIDE  LEAD  CCCS  COCP  PSU  **
Any views and opinions above have been carefully thought out and are sensible,
and so (obviously) do not represent SFU or any groups/committees within SFU. :|

"Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof!" --Arsinio Hall's audience, any show
"Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof!" --Bud Bundy, Married...With Children
"Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof!" --Dr. Beverly Crusher, ST:TNG, "True Q"