This is embarrassing. When I was in college I had a class that I never attended. Oh, maybe I went a few times, but I didn’t crack open the textbook. The semester came to a close and it was time for the exam.
I wasn’t ready. How could I be? I hadn’t gone to class or read the textbook. But that’s not the embarrassing part.
With only a couple of days left until the exam, I realized that if I didn’t do something, I would fail the class. So I did what many misguided college students do, I prepared a set of cheat notes.
I went through the textbook and took detailed notes. I had to skim the book, but the bullet points at the end of each chapter told me what was important. I wrote many pages of notes, referring back to the text to fill in the blanks. I then re-wrote my notes several times, each time condensing them.
The night before the exam, I had reduced an entire semester to two pages of notes.
I folded those two pages and put them in my shirt pocket for easy access. I hoped they would at least keep me from flunking.
The exam was in it an auditorium which seated hundreds of test-takers. I purposely chose a middle seat in a middle row so the proctors would have a harder time seeing me using my notes. They passed out the exam, I took a deep breath, and began.
When it was over, I felt pretty good about what I had written. I felt even better because I never did look at my notes.
I didn’t have to. I knew the material. I learned it in two days. What I thought would be a cheat sheet turned out to be a study guide and it helped me to get a B.
I was proud of myself, because I didn’t cheat and because I discovered that I was capable of doing some pretty amazing things. If I could learn an entire semester’s worth of material in two days, what else could I do?
(Don’t bust my chops; I realize I cheated myself by not going to class. I’m making a point here, Mom.)
Having a deadline helped. So did the looming potential of a failing grade. But when the chips were down, I found that I could more than I thought, in less time than I thought.
Oh yeah, I got something else out of the experience.
Years later, when I was studying for the Bar exam, even though I had gone to class and done the homework and taken mid-terms and gotten good grades, even though I was well-prepared for the Bar exam, I used my “cheat sheet” idea to create study guides for each subject. I took my all of my notes, and all of the bar review manuals, and everything else I had, and distilled them down to a few pages per subject, and finally, to a single page per subject.
I still wasn’t done. I took those seven or eight pages and reduced them to one. Three years of law school on a one page study guide.
Call me crazy, but there was no way I was going to take the Bar exam again. I didn’t have to, but decades later, I still have dreams about the damn thing.
