Roboquiz.

I can hardly believe that I just took my first quiz in 20 years. Can you imagine such a thing? But it’s true. The last time I took a quiz I was still deep in my undergraduate career at the University of Chicago. What class was I taking at the time of the quiz? I can hardly remember. It might have been Chinese Pottery. Or it might have been Death and Dying, the tutorial on the ancient burial mounds of Etruscan Italy. It’s hard to recall. But I do know this: It was before there were computers! Or, rather, it was just before computers started being available for all and sundry. Computers were available for NORAD and the CIA and whatnot , just not for students.

In the olden days, quizzes were on Xeroxed or mimeographed paper, and you had a little pencil. You would write on the paper – or maybe you would write on some scratch paper and not on the test itself, as the test might need to be recycled for the next class. You would scribble at top speed, and the back of your hand would the same color of the ink as it shlooped through the lines you were writing (remember, I am left handed). And you would get the dreaded writer’s cramp!

At the end of the hour, the pointy nosed professor (or proctor) would yell, “Time! Please pass your papers up to the front of each row!” And you would. After that, if you had a particularly lazy and silly professor, he/she would shuffle the papers and then pass them out again, and you would grade someone else’s paper.

However, nowadays, things have just gotten so dag-nabbit computerized. The professor sends you a little e-mail to say that the quiz will be available for a certain amount of time and that you will have two hours to do it when you sign on. Worse, you will have only one attempt, and if something goes wrong, you do not get to try again. What if I am doing the quiz at a Wifi-equipped café and the power goes out? Everything will be lost! One thing that the modern era has done is craft a whole new spin on the Dog Ate My Homework excuse. Now it’s “the Wifi went down and caused Blackboard to crash!”

So there I was. Last night, I was so apprehensive, I created this whole outline of the chapters I was supposed to read in the TOTALLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE MANAGEMENT TEXTBOOK. The outline was tied to page numbers so, during the quiz, I would be able to find the proper part of the chapter quickly by looking at the outline first and then going to the book. (Librarian joke: I had created Metadata for the chapters!)

Anyway, after my lunch of chili at Amelia’s Café on Main Street, I decided that I would take my quiz at the tiny Ocean Park Branch of the Santa Monica Public Library. Although this branch is a delightful place to read and study, I must confess it was a risky proposition, as I realized that it was only too possible that the Wifi signal would fail midway through and I would be shut out of the “one time only” access to the quiz. But I figured that it would be worth the challenge to take the test in pleasant environs.

I clicked on the “Enter Quiz!” page and was forwarded to another page, warning me that I had only ONE chance to open the page. How I trembled with terror! I swear I just sat there for two minutes, saying to myself , “Oh my stars! I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” My finger kept inching towards the “yes!” button – but then I snatched it back. It was the elemental “leap into the cold water of the swimming pool” moment made flesh. Of course, I finally girded my worthless loins and entered the quiz.

Quizzes nowadays are kind of funny. There’s one question per page, and you must answer it and click “save and proceed” to get onto the next question. Only once did I press a button and this horrifying balloon appeared on the screen, yowling, “STOP! DO YOU MEAN TO SUBMIT THIS TEST? YOU HAVE NOT ANSWERED QUESTIONS 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 AND 15! KEEP PRESSING THIS BUTTON IF YOU WISH TO SUBMIT!” You see, of course I had pressed the “exit” button by mistake. I hurriedly clicked “no”, of course, and returned to my work.

Really, I must wonder when they decided all tests need to be like “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” It was all multiple choice, and I have to confess that my outline was definitely the way to go. The most horrible thing, though, was when I finally pressed “submit” and sent the test away. Within 10 seconds, maybe less, I received a bleep from the computer, telling me that the thing had already been graded! I did all right, I must admit – 14 out of 15. But I have decided that, in this online grad school thing, my professor is a robot. How could she be otherwise?