The Quiz

The Genetics Lab has two sections: Wendnesday and Thurday. Feng is Wendnesday's TA. I am the Thurday's.

Yesterday, after his section, Feng told me:"They had a quiz today."

Professor H's quiz, for many, is a scary thing. On the first day he took over the lab, before anything else, he said:"Let's do a quiz first. If you have read the handouts I gave you last week, you'll have no problem." Apparently, few students read it, for most of them scored 0, which deeply angered him, and triggered his constant yelling in the lab.

So today I hurried to the lab early to warn my students. But Professor H was already distributing test tubes around the lab when I got there. The early students sat around, chatting, not aware what was waiting for them.

I waited. Finally, he went out of the lab to grab his coffee cup from his office next door. I told the students:" You know there's a quiz today, don't you?"

They were agitated immediately and started reading handouts and notes. Some of them looked up at me with gratitude. That was the look I wanted to see. I felt I was a hero, a savior.

A few minutes later, he came back, closed the door, and started the lab. Everybody looked at him with a we-all-knew-your-dirty-trick-so-bring-it-on smile, and waited him to produce a stack of paper from his big white envelope he brought in with him.

He looked around the lab and opened the envelope. From it he took out a piece of paper, the "attendance sheet", and made a note of who were late for the lab. Then he inserted it back into the envelope, put it aside, and said:"Today what we are going to do is very simple..."

What? No quiz?

Students looked at me in puzzlement. I looked back at them in greater puzzlement.

The lab ended with a lot of usual yelling but no quiz.

Sorry, guys, false alarm.

Later I talked to his former TA about today's incident. She smiled, nodded, and said:"He never gave two succesive quizzes. He always gives a quiz to one class but not the other. And several weeks later, he gives a different quiz to the other class."

Ah. That was why. I was fooled.

The take-home lesson: espionage is a risky career.