I was in honors freshman chemistry at university. Tough class, all homework (lots of it) graded rigorously, but only the midterm and final counted toward the course grade. So if you wanted an A you had to get an A on both exams.

After midterm, during every other lecture at least, the professor would sound a refrain: “An orbital is not a house! An electron does not live in a house!”

Final exam had a small number of complex problems to work out with pen and paper, tough stuff, lots of calculus. But the last question ended with “where does the electron live?”

That final problem, if you ignored the end wording, was super easy, something almost trivial to do with Helium iirc. The class had about 25 students in it; about 5 of us independently had the same thought: “this is a trick question, ‘the orbital is not a house in which the electron lives!’” And, independently, that’s how we five answered.

And we got marked wrong, all our course grades dropped to B+/- because of that one damn question.

Over a lunch or whatever, we discovered our shared experience and approached the professor as a group. He listened patiently and said: “Ah, right, I did insist on that idea, it’s understandable why you would think it’s a trick question and answer that way. But I still consider your answers wrong, grades stay as they are.” Some in the group even went to the dean and, to my understanding, he said it’s best to consider it a life lesson and move on.

Having gone both to a liberal arts institution and a large public university, it is not clear to me what the professors in the latter were actually doing vis a vis their teaching responsibilities that actually provided value.

Lectures that came straight from the book I could have read, recitations and problem reviews done by grad students, and tests that were little more than variations on homework problems of varying difficulty.

Maybe they were getting paid for research, but I dunno. At the liberal arts college, I actually received an education instead of bootstrapping it myself from a syllabus.

I agree this seems overly principled to me.

I recall a DSP class where there was an exam with a question like (not exactly this):

> What does the following code print?

> `printf("Hello, world!");`

If you responded with:

> Hello, world!

...which - of course - the whole class did, you got the question wrong.

If you responded with:

> "Hello, world!"

...which is actually not what that would print, you got the question right.

A small band of us went to the professor and noted that, in fact, `printf("Hello, world!")` does not print the quotes. But he wanted us to show that it printed a string, and we denote strings by quotes.

This was something that we learned to do just for him - all strings had to be enclosed by quotes, to denote that they were strings. As far as I'm concerned, it served no practical purpose; we never had to differentiate strings like "Hello" from ['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 0] or other representations.

A better example of how this could go - and not one that had anywhere near the same stakes - was a question on the entrance exam for my college radio station:

> What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

I got this question right by answering, "Ni!"

(edit: formatting)

Yeah? What "life lesson" does the dean think you're going to learn from that? That authority figures cannot be trusted because they will hurt you with bureaucratic stupidity. Does the dean, as an authority figure, really want that to be the lesson you learn?