Philo Exam

An intrinsic part of student life are Philo/Theo exams. ORAL exams. I still get bad dreams about those up til now, can you believe it? Panel interviews or revalidas don't scare me. Presentations or speeches to an auditorium full of colleagues certainly don't bring on nightmares. But those oral exams still give me the hives.

So, I am bringing an anecdote that is abused in Philosophy classes but certainly holds true. That reality is whatever you want to make of it.

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An eccentric philosophy professor gave a one-question
final exam after a semester dealing with a broad array
of topics.

The class was already seated and ready to go when the
professor picked up his chair, plopped it on his desk
and wrote on the board: "Using everything we have
learned this semester, prove that this chair does not
exist."

Fingers flew, erasers erased, blue books were filled in
furious fashion. Some students wrote over 30 pages in
one hour attempting to refute the existence of the
chair. One member of the class however, was up and
finished in less than a minute.

Weeks later when the grades were posted, the rest of
the group wondered how he could have gotten an A when
he had barely written anything at all. His answer
consisted of two words: "What chair?"