Four Types of Stuy Students During Exams

By now, you should be familiar with the horrified feeling you get when your teacher announces a pop quiz, or when you walk into a classroom and realize there is a test you completely forgot about. The frantic thoughts rushing through your head—“There’s a test? What test? What’s a test?!”—don’t save you from your situation, and you watch in despair as your teacher menacingly hands out stacks of paper to each row. Luckily for you, there are still people worse off than you—at least you were smart enough to remember the formula for the area of a rectangle.

So, you may ask, what are the kinds of people you’ll see during any test in every classroom?

Aristotle

You sense your friend’s anxious glare intensifying over their ominous white paper as you hear your teacher gleefully yell out, “15 minutes left!” The problem? They haven’t even finished a third of their test! Every time they answer a question, their mind engages in a deep philosophical debate over whether their answer is really correct. They check and check, plugging “3+5” and “7-2” into their calculator to make sure their memory is serving them right. They begin hallucinating given how many times they’ve checked over question #2, which asks about the probability of rolling an even number on a standard die. Sure, their answer is probably correct, but they still have two-thirds of their test staring blankly at them.

The worst part? This is a multiple-choice test, so they can just choose one answer and move on. Perhaps they should have a bit more faith in probability…

Speedster

For the 3726th time, you try locking in and focusing on your test, but the obnoxiously loud sound of paper rustling and turning is coming from right beside you. You try glaring at the person to get their attention, but they’re too focused on finishing the test as quickly as possible, scribbling nonsense with their pencil and causing the entire class to look up, wondering where the sound is coming from. They’re the polar opposite of your friend Aristotle, who is still on question #4 and is currently pondering the meaning of division.

Speedster flips through all 30 pages of the test in less than 10 minutes, not even bothering to check if they bubbled in their answers correctly (they didn’t) or if their answers even make sense (they answered “Abraham Lincoln” to a question about Jeffrey buying 56 apples). Their ultimate goal? To cram in an extra half hour of sleep between the time they finish and when the period ends. After all, who cares about your GPA when you’re a sleep-deprived zombie?

Overdramatic

Remember those days in middle school when you would consider a 97 a bad score? Well, there are at least three people in every classroom who are still stuck in that mindset (or at least pretend to be). One such case would be your friend here, who is about to take the same test as you.

After realizing that you completely forgot about a test, you spend your lunch period cramming. As you approach your classroom, you see your friend, who has a (seemingly) nervous expression on their face. You ask the usual, “Are you ready? Did you study? Because I barely did.”

Your friend responds in a whiny voice: “Noooo! I didn’t even know there was an exam until two minutes ago!”

“Phew,” you think, feeling reassured. “At least I’m not the only one who is severely unprepared.” You walk into the classroom and struggle through the test, but at least there’s still one other person who did as badly as you, right? Wrong.

When test results come out, you stare at the 68 on your screen with a disappointed but unsurprised reaction before turning to your friend. “What did you get?” you ask.

Your friend turns towards you with a (seemingly) horrified expression. “I bombed it! Oh no! My parents… what will my parents say?” You look over at their screen, expecting to see a score in the 60s, but what do your eyes get assaulted with? A 94.

It takes every fiber of your being not to tear everything around you to shreds.

Magician

There’s this one person who always sits in the back and never participates. You probably don’t even realize they’re in your class until the last two weeks of the school year. 

It’s the same way on test days. They come in looking completely clueless (which they are), but somehow, they manage to score better than people who actually study.

The good news is, you sit near them, so you know their trick to acing every test. You keep hearing them mumble, “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” and you witness their eraser falling onto their desk, revealing one of four letters every time they flip it. The bad news is that you have absolutely no idea how luck is always on their side; that one time you tried the same thing, you ended up with a 23 on your test.

Perhaps there’s more to their trick than they let on… better gather those two brain cells of yours and figure it out!

So there you have it: four types of people you’ll see in every exam room. No matter which one you are, tests are a universal struggle. Maybe you’ll walk out with an A; maybe you’ll leave the room realizing you didn’t complete the back side of the test paper. Either way, you can rest assured there’s at least one person in the room who has it worse than you.