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If you were like me and avoided studying at the library in college because it was too intense, then you wouldn’t want to visit Exam Ville in South Korea. There about twenty thousand people live and study for law school entrance exams, civil service tests and a variety of other tests. One poor guy has been there for five years repeatedly trying to get into law school.
Link – via Geeks Are Sexy (Photo: Matt Douma/LA Times)
by Mike Adams
Department of Biology
Eastern Connecticut State University
Willimantic, Connecticut
It has long been theorized that the week prior to an exam is an extremely dangerous time for the relatives of college students. Ever since I began my teaching career, I heard vague comments, incomplete references and unfinished remarks, all alluding to the “Dead Grandmother Problem.”
Few colleagues would ever be explicit in their description of what they knew, but I quickly discovered that anyone who was involved in teaching at the college level would react to any mention of the concept. In my travels I found that a similar phenomenon is known in other countries. In Eng- land it is called the “Graveyard Grannies” problem, in France the “Chere Grand’mere,” while in Bulgaria it is inexplicably known as “The Toadstool Waxing Plan” (I may have had some problems here with the translation. Since the revolution this may have changed anyway.) Although the problem may be international in scope it is here in the USA that it reaches its culmination, so it is only fitting that the first warnings originate here also.
The basic problem can be stated very simply:
A student’s grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.
While this idea has long been a matter of conjecture or merely a part of the folklore of college teaching, I can now confirm that the phenomenon is real. For over twenty years I have collected data on this supposed relationship, and have not only confirmed what most faculty had suspected, but also found some additional aspects of this process that are of potential importance to the future of the country. The results presented in this report provide a chilling picture and should waken the profession and the general public to a serious health and sociological problem before it is too late.
more …
OK, so some of your friends (or maybe you) have flunked a grade at some point or took a little longer than you planned with college but … 44 years? Vegetable stand or no, it is hard to imagine being so busy with work that you simply cannot study enough to pass secondary school exams. But one man has had precisely this problem:
A 65 year-old-man from Kanpur city in India is taking his secondary school exams for the 44th time, hoping this time he’ll finally pass. Undeterred by 43 years of trying without success, Mian Jabbar Husen is determined to make yet another attempt.
Hayley Platt reports in this Reuters video clip: Link
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