The Final Examination

  Roy is a professor in UCLA, one of the top universities in America. He lives with his wife, two daughters and his dog named Ellis near the campus in Los Angeles. He was considered to be a science genius when he was in school. After getting his doctorate in Stanford, he came to teach mathematics in UCLA.

  As a responsible and capable professor, he loves mathematic and he loves teaching young people. He always prepares his classes carefully and he holds that every student will enjoy the class. But it seems that things are not going like that…

  As usual, the annual final examination was coming, other teachers had even been talking about how to enjoy the following vocation, but Roy was baffled. He realized that this year he couldn’t raise the exam questions as before.

  Now Roy is teaching the juniors, in retrospect, when his students were rookies, he was so popular that almost each student tried to get a closer seat to him. So the results of rookie final exam were quite good which made him more inspired to put more effort on his teaching. But in the second year, he found that the sophomores presenting class was becoming less and less. It was confusing, he thought maybe the students were busy with their own affairs or other subject. Since they were all adults, it wasn’t suitable to sermonize them. He thought just let the final examination marks teach them a lesson. But to his surprise, the results of each student were still very unbelievably good. What he neglected was that students of UCLA were all so intelligent, those who truanted borrowed others’ notebook to review on their own. Therefore it wasn’t surprising about the result. So it made Roy so baffled that what questions to set. If he organized the exam to raise some similar subjects to the ones he taught in class just like before, no doubt students would get high marks again. Roy spent two days on it, finally a perfect idea came out.

  With the bell ringing, Roy’s students stepped into the classroom to take the final examination, they all looked confident, some of whom Roy even hadn’t seen for a long time. But soon they found there was only one exam paper. It was strange. When they looked at the paper, there were six different photos of six different men, and below them the question was: During that one week when I was weak in bed, which two of them helped me teach you for two lessons?

  Of course, some students failed the exam. Maybe what they neglected is the professor they considered a bit old was a genius, but he still is.