One of these days I will actually get around to writing about writing, but today I’m a bit distracted. Tomorrow—as in tomorrow—I’ll be taking the New York Bar Exam, a whirlwind of two days of examination fun. For the uninitiated, the Bar Exam is, alas, nothing to do with spiritous liquors. Instead, it’s the qualifying exam to practice law in a given state, since the board of law examiners has very correctly determined that over three years of law school one learns very little about the actual practice of law, although a great deal about the fine art of sleeping while in an upright position at a desk.

Over the past few months, I’ve heard my fair share of exam horror stories: there’s the girl who gave birth in the middle of the exam (as far as I know, that shouldn’t be a problem for me); the man who went mad from the pressure and ran up and down the aisles of the Javitz Center announcing the Second Coming (no one seemed particularly interested, unless He appeared bearing exam answer sheets); and, of course, the inevitable boy who filled in all the answers to the multiple choice in the wrong bubbles. Then you have my mother, who has pointed out that she managed to pass the Bar Exam with a small, screaming child in tow. For the record, I don’t remember there being any screaming involved. But Mom flatly refuses to replace “small and screaming” with “utterly adorable.”

None of these test-taking nightmares can beat my favorite grad school exam horror story. In the history department, we finished up our first two years of course work with oral exams, which involved being grilled by four faculty members. In the middle is a ten minute break, where the department secretary brings in tea and cookies for the faculty members while you flee into the bathroom to bang your head against the wall (head banging is absolutely essential to the oral exam process). One year, the examinee made the traditional trip to the bathroom. He didn’t reappear. The faculty, having finished all the cookies, began to get curious. Then they began to get worried. A search of the bathroom yielded no clues. He had vanished, as completely as the cookies on the tray. Three hours later, the mysteriously disappearing historian called his advisor. Forget the bathroom; he wasn’t even in Cambridge. He’d gotten so stressed that when he walked out the door of that examination room, he just kept on going, right past the bathroom, down the hall, and out of the building. He climbed into his car and kept on driving until he hit New Hampshire.

No one has ever been able to explain why New Hampshire (it must have just seemed like a good idea at the time), but when I was studying for my orals, the first piece of advice I was given on how to pass was “Don’t drive to New Hampshire.”

It’s probably a good thing that I don’t know how to drive, because New Hampshire is looking pretty attractive right about now….

What are your worst exam horror stories?