The Exam Effect

Exam mode means a lot of library time, a lot of ramen noodles and a lot of frankly worthless swearing at complicated flow charts in prescribed textbooks. To put it mildly, exam mode is not good for health. Not so mildly put, exam mode turns people into very weird beings indeed.

Take that day when I was studying for my chemistry exam for instance. I was quietly seated in an empty classroom, with the AC turned on at just the perfect temperature (Malaysians have this game they play which aims to freeze the others in a room to death), a cup of steaming black coffee and my books and notebooks with a yellow highlighter in hand. I vaguely remember I was reading something about benzene when vaaaaap... the most irresistible urge to shave my hair off overwhelmed me. Why in god's name I would ever want to do such a thing while studying benzene, I have no idea, but my bag I grabbed before making my way to the nearest hair parlor in town. An hour later, I was back to my same spot in university with less hair on my head.

I'm not the only one who goes nuts in exam mode either. A couple of days after the "hair shaving" epiphany, I was in the exam hall sitting for the chemistry paper. Two hours into the three-hour exam and only a third of the way through my paper, I noticed a guy a couple of rows in front of me. Keep in mind that I don't notice individual guys very often but that one was very hard to miss. He was acting all Picasso on an invisible canvas which appeared to be hanging in midair before him. Seconds later, he dropped the weirdness and went back to Picasso-ing his exam paper instead. I can only guess that that was his way of recollecting the different steps of the Michael nucleophilic addition of enolate anions. Well, I left the answer space blank for that one.

If you're thinking that these uncanny behaviors were due to the chemistry exam, well you would be right to a certain extent. I can safely say that I didn't notice any other Picassos in my following exams. What I did see however, was a girl turning bulimic over potato crisps in an exam hall. I was deep in thoughts doing my utmost best to remember the name of the fungus responsible for Tinea unguium when the reverberant sound of a packet of crisps resonated across the exam hall. My head turned in the direction of the noise's source instinctively-as did many other heads. And there I saw her: the most untroubled girl with a packet of crisps on her chair between her legs, voraciously engulfing handfuls of processed potatoes down her throat. The screeching of the packet, the munching of her chews and the gulps of her swallows. A cacophony orchestrated with the sole purpose of feeding the mind so as to remember the name of that cursed fungus, methinks. Only one possible conclusion: microbiology can turn even the cutest girl into a raucous bulimic.

Like the full moon to the werewolves, exams mess with students. And once the moon starts disappearing again, the students become humans again and all is good with the world-and bars. I now wonder what the full moon's equivalent is in a lab.

P.S. You really shouldn't but if you are wondering, the fungus that causes the dermatophytic infection of the nail bed that is Tinea unguium is Trichophyton rubrum. I didn't answer that question either. Don't get me started about microbes' names again.

Image Credits: jackhynes (via Flickr) and Xin Li 88 (via Flickr)