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The Philosophy Student

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My degree is in Philosophy and I wish I had a quid for every time someone has related the following story to me:

Philosophy exam question "Is this a question?"
Student answers "Is this an answer?"

And gets full marks.

I always tell people that this is quite obviously a UL but they're always convinced its true. Anyone know the provenance of this?
 
I don't know where it origanaly came from but I do remember reading something along those lines a decade or more ago in the readers digest, it wasen't funny then either:rolleyes:

Surely the student answering that question with the (a-ha-ha)"is this an answer?" should have recived a big red cross for their eforts because:

1) they haven't answered the question mearly asked another.

2) Gramaticly if a sentence starts with 'is this a' before the subject and ends with a ruddy great question mark there are no contery arguments apart from: life and all experience may be an illusion.

3) He/she was guilty of acting like a smartarse which usuly when marking exam papers ends up with a nice red line put through the prose.

So I'm hazarding a guess that this is one of those ULs that never hapened in reality.
 
You're right there Oll, this kind of question just wouldn't be asked, and such an answer would result in said smartarse student getting a big fat zero for their trouble.

One of the final exams was a general paper (which I avoided as I took the Dissertation option) which had a list of about 12 words on it, you had to pick one and write about it for 3 hours. The words were concepts such as Beauty, Truth, Time etc.

I suppose to the uninitiated this seems pretty esoteric, even pretentious in itself, writing pages and pages about the nature of reality and so on - but we know different, don't we Forteans?
 
The version that I heard went along the lines of

"Is this a question?"

Students response
"Only if this is an answer."

The other "famous" philosophy exam attempt is:

"What is courage?"

Student's response
"This."

Again the apocryphal student gets full marks.
 
is the question about hell "is hell exothermic or endothermic?" variously in a chemistry/physics/religion exam also a UL - if i find it i'll post the answer but it's something smartassy
 
The version I heard (from a mate doing philosophy at Uni back in about '81 or thereabouts) was:

Question: Why?

Student's Answer: Why not?

He insisted that the student who gave the above answer was a mate of his at Uni and got a pass mark for it, but since the same guy had (unsuccessfully) attempted to make me believe that the 'Kentucky Fried Rat' myth had happened to a friend of his sister's when I first met him in 1979, I reckoned it was a) amusing, but b) almost certainly untrue given the source.
 
In respect to the previous post, I remember reading that the actual correct answer to Why? is Because.
 
Fortis said:
The other "famous" philosophy exam attempt is:

"What is courage?"

Student's response
"This."
Click to expand...

I've heard that one too, but in my version, the student writes his answer on the verso of the sheet of paper - thus running the additional risk that the examiner won't turn the paper over.
 
I was one of the first years to do GCSE's and one of the questions in my maths exam ,and I promise I'm not making this up, was: "When making a cup of tea, should you put the milk in first"?

And they wonder why so many of us got bad marks!
 
Auntie Peach said:
My degree is in Philosophy and I wish I had a quid for every time someone has related the following story to me:

Philosophy exam question "Is this a question?"
Student answers "Is this an answer?"

And gets full marks.

I always tell people that this is quite obviously a UL but they're always convinced its true. Anyone know the provenance of this?
Click to expand...

Quite - if i'd ever written this in a philosophy exam three things would have happened:

1. I would have failled the exam.
2. For failling the exam i would have failled the module.
3. For failling a module i would have been be removed from my degree course.

I would feel like a tit and rightly so.

The other complete myth is that one can get stoned and write a groundbreaking philosophy essay - crap - try getting mashed and reading Kant or Hegel.

As to where the first legend came from i have met with some questions that, to the non-philospher, sound daft or pointless. Two i recall were: What is Truth? and What is meant by if?. The questions are alluding to various approaches to logic and metaphysics but a non-philosopher may think it's carte blanche to pen a polemic around their strange world view.
 
I got told about these innumerable times as a philosophy student and it didn't seem to match up with my exam experience either.

My favourite version of the exam story is the high-performing lads who have just one all-important exam left, but have been carousing the night before the last exam with friends half way across the country. They wake up the next morning to realize the alarm hasn't gone off and they are going to be very late for the final exam. They dash back to the university and explain to their professor they had a flat tyre and couldn't get to the examination on time. Given their exemplary performance to date, he agrees to allow them to sit the exam. They are ushered into separate rooms with an invigilator and handed their exam papers. Each question paper contains only one question: Which tyre?
 
My father once related to me the tale of students stopping a discussion by asking: "What are you meaning by 'meaning'?"

Of course this month the FT asks "How Real is Real?"
 
Another Philosophy grad weighs in...

Right ho...
The most 'stupid' question I've seen on a real Philosophy test was "Does time exist?" Unsurprisingly, I did the one explaining why backwards time-travel wasn't possible instead.

As to the ridiculous theory that being stoned helps one write great philosophy essays... Maybe true in polytechnics, but I don't think so in real Universities (I say real. Some of you mayknow that I went to Keele. "cough"). However, I did once write a three thousand word essay on Formal Logic the morning it had to be in and managed to get a first for it. Also, thinking about it, my final essay was written at four in the morning, in the throes of gastro-enteritis, which left me shitting the bed for days after (too much detail..?), and I got a 2:1 overall, so maybe some 'altered states' are positive factors in writing philosophy essays. Wouldn't recommend re-enacting my adventures to see scientifically, though. Uuugghhh...
 
Re: Another Philosophy grad weighs in...

101 said:
Right ho...
The most 'stupid' question I've seen on a real Philosophy test was "Does time exist?" Unsurprisingly, I did the one explaining why backwards time-travel wasn't possible instead.
Click to expand...

I think 'Does Time Exist?', is a standard nod towards McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time, which, contrary to what one may imagine, is not a polemic against the existence of time but rather a demonstration of the inconsistencies in our current conceptualisations of it.

Formal logic made my head hurt though :)
 
Re: Re: Another Philosophy grad weighs in...

The Yithian said:
I think 'Does Time Exist?', is a standard nod towards McTaggart's argument for the unreality of time,
Click to expand...

Yeah, but it's such a vague question. The kind that if a layman/taxi-driver saw, he could spend hours whinging aout what ollocks philosophy students get to write aout...
 
Re: Re: Another Philosophy grad weighs in...

The Yithian said:
Formal logic made my head hurt though :)
Click to expand...

Heh. My fave module. 'Introduction to Formal Logic'. Like philosophy, but with right and wrong answers.
 
I thought the question most asked of students of Philosophy is "Why don't you get a proper degree?" ;) :rolleyes:
 
Niles Calder said:
I thought the question most asked of students of Philosophy is "Why don't you get a proper degree?" ;) :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

:D, Well, after philosophy i moved on to English Literature which for potential wishy-washyness can blow philosophy out of the water most days ;)

On a serious note as a kid i used to be in awe of the idea of having a degree - i thought this made you a genius or something. Now the bubble has burst its clear to me that having a degree just means you were good at knowing how to pass a degree course as opposed to necessarilly good at your subject. That and the fact that their value is massively cheapened by the number of crap degrees awarded in silly subjects from disreputable institutions...but i rant. :)
 
Briefest Essay Passes Exam

Is it true that once a student answered an English exam question that read simply "Why?" with the two word essay "Why not?" and passed? I heard something like this on the radio this morning when I was half asleep and I'm not sure if I picked it up correctly.
 
The version I heard was about a Philosphy student, who responded to a question: "Is this a question?"

with

"Yes. Is this an answer?"

And of course got a first class degree, etc....

I think it's a fairly venerable FOAF story.
 
Timble2 said:
The version I heard was about a Philosphy student, who responded to a question: "Is this a question?"

with

"Yes. Is this an answer?"

And of course got a first class degree, etc....

I think it's a fairly venerable FOAF story.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it sounds like it. Having said that, I once had an exam question that read "I'm bored. Are you?" If only I'd answered "Yes" I'd have saved myself a lot of writing.
 
in one of my GCSE's I had the question: which should go in the cup first, the tea or the milk?
 
What the hell subject was that? :shock: Was "which way round should a loo roll hang?" a supplementary question?
 
Next we'll get the barometer and the tower (physics) and the would-be suicide who's shot dead after jumping off a roof etc etc (law).
 
something similiar appeared in a discworld novel (moving Pictures) where the entire paper was simply what is your name.
Not o mention the famous "do it on the radio" scenr from Educating Rita.
 
My husband had to write about the life and work of an artist for his illustration HND. He wrote about himself, and passed with distinction.
 
liveinabin1 said:
My husband had to write about the life and work of an artist for his illustration HND. He wrote about himself, and passed with distinction.
Click to expand...
Well done, him! 8)
 
Not quite the same thing but........

During our O-level English exams my friend (who was only showing up because he was booked in, and had no expectation of getting a usable grade) was stumped and just rewrote a story from the 2000AD comic he had read that morning.

The examiner was obviously impressed with the description of a dyspepsian future and the hero - a certain law enforcement officer called Judge Dredd.

Bugger got an A.
 
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