In Continuum.

If there is a convention for disasters of all kind, the winner of this convention would be a disaster that has the ability to turn anything in its path into ashes. That is to say, the disaster that has the ability to obliterate everything it touches would be crowned the monster powerful disaster of all. At such, I feel, a nuclear holocaust would be crowned every single year at the disaster convention, because there simply isn't a known force more powerful and more devastating to mankind than the explosion of a nuclear bomb. Granted, news reports are always telling you how many nuclear bomb explosions is an earthquake equivalent to. In terms of sheer power, I suppose you cannot beat an earthquake. Still, earthquakes happen deep down in the crust of the Earth, and the greatest earthquake caused a death toll to reach five digits, at best. Setting off a nuclear bomb, then, is a completely different story altogether. Given it's sheer power on the surface of the Earth, a nuclear bomb is going to destroy anything in its path and turn everything into dust, or even breaking things down into its molecules. What is even more horrifying is probably the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, with the survivors and their offsprings suffering from long-term illnesses and deformities. Yes, nuclear holocaust is the greatest of all disasters, and that is the best analogy for today's Sociology paper for me. 

The Sociology paper today was a giant mushroom cloud fuming with radioactive poison. Just imagine yourself being on the edge of a tiny town out in the middle of nowhere, and they probably forgot to check your part of the desert when they pressed that little red button. Picture, for a while, the mightiest of lights brightening up the skies, and the mushroom cloud of death soaring up into the Heavens as Hell approaches from miles away. Ten seconds later, it hits where you are, and the shock wave throws you off your feet and into the air, only to be disintegrated into tiny molecules with what was once your house. The same horrors for the next couple of miles or so, destroying everything and taking all that you once knew into Hell with you. Now, picture that in the confines of a classroom, inside the heads of every Sociology student under Kaveri, exploding a dozen times over with every passing question. The tables are still there in the exam venue, and the chairs are probably still sitting around there right now. The only victims of this horrible exam paper were our brains and our grades, which are definitely going to suffer. The paper was a giant nuclear holocaust of doom, and we were all blown away by it almost literally. 

It is one thing to expect a difficult paper, and it is another to actually experience a difficult paper. Of course, they are still pretty much in the same ball park, but nothing can prepare you from a hyper-difficult paper that was set to blow you right out of the waters. Our brains felt like a tofu in a submarine three miles under the surface of the ocean. Kaveri comes to blow a hole in the hull, and everything implodes in upon itself within half a second, and then there was silence. The silence was deathly, and you would find more cheer in a graveyard than the exam venue today. Of course, save for the quiet murmur of a vulgarity from the other side of the room, everything was dead silent. The paper was difficult beyond everything that I have ever experienced myself, and Jeremy agrees. Apparently, it was the most difficult paper that he has ever experienced, and I suppose that isn't exactly a very good thing at all. If you think that taking apart a car with only your teeth, multiply that by about ten and you will tease the idea of getting close to the difficulty of getting full marks in this paper - it's just not possible. She was obviously out to draw blood, and she obviously wanted to kill the entire student cohort so difficult that most Sociologists aren't probably going to be able to answer those questions anyway. It was like a shameless plug to the students, telling us that she has the knowledge to set papers this hard. Suddenly, she isn't so nice anymore now is she?

This is how I would describe the paper: It was a coalition of sociology, geography, history, science, economics, and a general paper in the mix. She would probably argue that Sociology is everything in this world, but do you really need to go as far as asking us about the compositions of acid rain, or the reason why fishes are not swimming around in a certain lake in America any longer? I am pretty sure the mass death of the fishes are not due to any sociological reasons, so I sat there wondering why she wanted to test us on these pointless and obscure things that is completely out of the context. True, that everything can be found in the textbook, but then you can also find a lot of other things inside there. The only thing she left out from this paper is probably the type of question that asks for a specific word on a specific page, in a specific chapter or what color was a particular person wearing in the picture on a particular page. She literally tested on every nook and every corner of every chapter, and it wasn't made easier that we already had a mammoth of work to deal with in the first place. Setting the paper this hard wasn't being strict, it was being cruel. She was being evil by putting us in a fix like that, and everybody fell into it.

Like I was saying, this paper is really the combination of every single paper out there. It has elements of geography, elements of history, and everything else that I have mentioned above. By question forty-five, I was half expecting William Shakespeare to pop out somewhere just because literature was probably the last untouched subject at that point in time. She was being overly demanding, overly meticulous, and completely ridiculous when she thought that we'd actually do well and score an A for this module - we probably won't. I mean, when the students in your class average at 70 for a simple class quiz, it is a sign that your papers are way over their heads. I scored a 93 for class participation, the poster and the brochures combined, but that forty-five percent really isn't going to help when I am going to be facing this massive mushroom cloud of destruction that is coming my way. When all the students are doing badly at your class, it isn't so much about the students but about the quality of the lecturer. Something is wrong with the lecturer when the students are under-performing, and everything will be reflected in our grades. Moderation better be set in place for this one, or else a lot of people are going to tear down the school building, brick by brick. 

Yesterday was a great day, because the supposedly "difficult" paper turned out to be pretty easy. In fact, for 317, I may be aiming for an A this time around, surprisingly. As much as I was fuming over the research paper last week and the two entries dedicated to bitching about her, at least she gave us a reasonable paper yesterday that had us smiling when we left the hall. Of course, part of the reason why we were smiling in the first place was because we were finally able to leave the hall after sitting there for one an a half hours without toilet break or early submission - the horrors! I finished the paper in half an hour, and sat there for a full hour just to entertain myself. I started by trying to count things in the hall, and those things included the speakers, the lights, the projectors, the round ventilation shafts, the long ventilation shafts, the water sprinklers, the ceiling panels - everything. I wrote everything on the table with pencil, and it turns out that there are 215 sprinklers in the hall alone, with 2160 ceiling panels to boot. Very impressive! That quickly grew old after I finished the math, which was why I went on to draw my I.C. on the back of the question paper. That one lasted for about fifteen minutes, and the last fifteen minutes was spent playing air guitar to a song in my head. We were all desperate, as you can see. 

So, the most intolerable part about the paper yesterday wasn't so much about the paper itself, but the time we had to endure afterwards. It wasn't enjoyable, but at least the paper was manageable. Then came the Goliath, the Sociology paper, the one that drove a knife through everyone's heart and baked us over a raging bonfire. To put things into perspective: we have two classes taking the exact same course, and thought by two different lecturers. The other class had to do 30 (or 35) multiple choice questions and two out of three essay questions. My class had to do 50 multiple choice questions and five out of six essay questions. Keep in mind that we are both allowed the same amount of time, which is why a lot of people from my class did not get to finish the essay questions at all. Most of them came out with one or two questions left undone, and you pretty much know that it isn't the fault of the students but the cruelty of the lecturer. Seriously, it was simple disastrous, and a plan for moderation better be in place, or else that shall be dire consequences. Many students would probably tear down the school, kill themselves, or both at the very same time. 

So, I am halfway through my exams, and things have been rather disastrous. I mean, if you want to be fair, things are going at fifty-fifty right now. But the horrors of today's paper is enough to overshadow the happiness of yesterday, and everything else just went to waste afterwards. What a horrible paper that was, and I really don't want to see her face around school ever again. In retrospect, it is just repulsive to think that the same nice and soft-spoken lecture was also the one who wanted our blood during the finals, the same one which my friends and I helped to put up posters and to negotiate with the school authorities a couple of weeks ago. So much for that, because your final paper is going to drag us down into the vortex of death, because you can't seem to understand that there is a limit to how much a student can study. You don't test us on something that is mentioned in the book for just one time in a line, shouldn't it be from a macro perspective and from a larger and broader point of view? So much for teaching us about those though, because none of those came out. All you did was to test us on sociologists we have never heard of before, and governmental policies in America which has nothing to do with Sociology at all. You might as well test us on the size of your son's feet, I think we'd stand a better chance.