![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/gdogg.jpg\")
There
\n has been much attention in the past few days to an infamous final examination
\n – 20 questions – which was
\n administered at the conclusion of a course called "Coaching Principles
\n and Strategies of Basketball" at the University of Georgia. Not, coincidentally,
\n considering the subject, most of the students in the course were varsity
\n basketball players. After finding numerous anecdotes and false leads,
\n the Dowbrigade tracked down the actual official Final Exam…<\/p>\n
The 20-question final exam that Jim Harrick Jr. gave to students in his
\n Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball course in the fall
\n of 2001:<\/p>\n
1. How many goals are on a basketball court?
\na. 1 b. 2 c. 3 d. 4<\/p>\n
2. How many players are allowed to play at one time on any one team in a regulation
\ngame?
\na. 2 b. 3 c. 4 d. 5<\/p>\n
3.\tIn what league does the Georgia Bulldogs compete?
\na. ACC b. Big Ten c. SEC d. Pac 10<\/p>\n
4.\tWhat is the name of the coliseum where the Georgia Bulldogs play?
\n a. Cameron Indoor Arena b. Stegeman Coliseum c. Carrier Dome d. Pauley Pavilion<\/p>\n
5.\tHow many halves are in a college basketball game?
\n a. 1 b. 2 c. 3 d. 4<\/p>\n
6.\tHow many quarters are in a high school basketball game?
\n a. 1 b. 2 c. 3 d. 4<\/p>\n
7.\tHow many points does one field goal account for in a Basketball Game?
\n a. 1 b. 2 c. 3 d. 4<\/p>\n
8.\tHow many points does a 3-point field goal account for in a Basketball Game?
\n a. 1 b. 2 c. 3 d. 4
\n 9.\tHow many officials referee a college basketball game?
\n a. 2 b. 4 c. 6 d. 3<\/p>\n
10.\tHow many teams are in the NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship Tournament?
\n a. 48 b. 64 c. 65 d. 32<\/p>\n
11. What is the name of the exam which all high school seniors in the State of
\n Georgia must pass?
\n a. Eye Exam b. How Do The Grits Taste Exam c. Bug Control Exam d. Georgia Exit
\n Exam<\/p>\n
12.\tWhat basic color are the uniforms the Georgia Bulldogs wear in home games?
\n a. White b. Red c. Black d. Silver<\/p>\n
13.\tWhat basic color are the uniforms the Georgia Bulldogs wear in away games?
\n a. Pink b. Blue c. Orange d. Red<\/p>\n
14.\tHow many minutes are played in a college basketball contest?
\n a. 20 b. 40 c. 60 d. 90<\/p>\n
15.\tHow many minutes are played in a high school basketball game?
\n a. 15 b. 30 c. 32 d. 45<\/p>\n
16.\tDiagram the 3-point line.<\/p>\n
17.\tDiagram the half-court line.<\/p>\n
18. How many fouls is a player allowed to have in one Basketball game before
\n fouling out in that game?
\n a. 3 b. 5 c. 7 d. 0<\/p>\n
19. If you go on to become a huge coaching success, to whom will you tribute
\n (sic) the credit?
\n a. Mike Krzyzewski b. Bobby Knight c. John Wooden d. Jim Harrick Jr.<\/p>\n
20.\tIn your opinion, who is the best Division I assistant coach in the country?
\n a. Ron Jursa (sic) b. John Pelphrey c. Jim Harrick Jr. d. Steve Wojciechowski<\/p>\n
Source: University of Georgia <\/p>\n
Answer key: Aww. c’mon….<\/p>\n
Ah, the sweet smell of athletic\/academic scandal. Almost all American
\n universities have a few courses like this, although usually a bit better
\n disguised. In
\n this case, the professor, Jim Harrick, Jr. (see question 19), got busted
\n mainly because he
\n is also an assistant coach on the varsity basketball team and the SON of the
\n head coach.<\/p>\n
The Dowbrigade is risking ostracism from Harvard Clubs
\n around the world by revealing one
\n of higher educations dirty little secrets – even the best colleges
\n have professors,
\n courses
\n and even
\n entire
\n departments
\n with less academic rigor than your typical wine-tasting course at a YMCA. At Harvard,
\n for example, it was not uncommon to see large, athletic bodies moving
\n in and out of the domain of the East Asian Studies Dept. While we are
\n certain that much of the jocks intellectual attraction to the field was
\n sincere, that attractiveness was certainly augmented by the fact
\n that many of the courses in that department went Jim Harrick Jr. one
\n better in that they HAD NO EXAM AT ALL. Two short papers and in-class
\n discussion and that’s it. Everybody gets A’s. Very Zen. This goes a long way towards explaining why the Dowbrigade is such a font of useless information concerning Korean history, Early Chinese Philosophy and Japanese Landscape Painting.<\/p>\n
But the easiest course we took in our entire career at
\n the World’s Greatest University was not in East Asian Studies. It was History course officially entitled "15th and 16th
\n Century Spanish and Portuguese Navigational History". although it was
\n affectionately known by proto-slacker undergraduates as "Boats". <\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/brutus.jpg\")
We
\n took the course at the urging of our obliquely brilliant and artistically
\n bizarre roommate, Brutus Godspeed. During his teen years,
\n Brutus’s father had been US Ambassador to Portugal, and Brutus grew up
\n in Lisbon,
\n attending
\n the American School by day and playing Flamenco guitar at the Lisbon
\n Playboy Club at night. He had developed a serious interest in,
\n guess what, Spanish and Portuguese explorers, and knew the subject down
\n to the dimensions of capacity of each of the ships and the political
\n machinations and business scams behind each expedition. So we figured
\n that with Godspeed coaching us the course would be a gut.<\/p>\n
That particular semester, however, our involvement in
\n a variety of illicitly entrepreneurial and extra-academic ethnobotanical
\n activities almost completely overwhelmed our feeble attempts to hew
\n the legitimate ivy line, and we were absent from campus for long
\n periods both physically and mentally. After attending the first
\n few classes of "Boats" and being excruciatingly bored, we somehow missed
\n the ensuing 12 weeks of classes and basically abandoned any hope of
\n passing the course.<\/p>\n
In fact, we had completely forgotten that the course existed,
\n until early one enchanted and prematurely dark January evening when Brutus
\n enquired as to why we were not studying for the "Boats" final, apparently
\n scheduled for the following day.<\/p>\n
"Brutus, old boy," we tried to look him in the eye, but
\n were having trouble focusing, so we somewhat desperately grabbed his
\n shoulder, "we’re far beyond "Boats" at this point. In case you didn’t
\n notice I was out of town from Halloween until Thanksgiving and spent
\n a week in December naked in the bathroom convinced there were microwave
\n antennae woven into my clothes." <\/p>\n
"Hey, we’ve all got problems, bro.” Brutus was trying to calm me while simultaneously slipping my grip. “But there’s still plenty of
\n time to pass this course. No need to panic." He was arranging all of
\n his notes and study materials on the lower bunk, and cranking up "Kraftwerk"
\n on the stereo.<\/p>\n
"But, man, like, I didn’t so to any of the lectures since
\n the first week, didn’t do any of the reading assignments, and,” (here we paused for dramatic effect and irrefutable logic) ” I
\n dissolved one of those Mr. Natural blotter acids under my tongue about
\n half an hour ago." I looked out the window for the familiar signs of
\n the acid taking hold. The darkened sky had started to spit sporadic
\n snowflakes into the yellow cones of street light illuminating the Winthrop House courtyard. The shadows danced
\n like living things. It was beginning. It was hopeless.<\/p>\n
"Hey, no problem, shit, you suck on that stuff like breath
\n mints. Besides, you know that the professor wrote the damn text book,
\n and he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. There’s really only three
\n chapters you need to remember and that’s the
\n whole course. If you can wrap your twisted mind around about 75
\n pages of admittedly boring text, you can save yourself a lot of hassle
\n and several thousand dollars, which is what you’ll have to pay if you
\n fail the course and have to make it up."<\/p>\n
He was right. "Put on water for coffee." <\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/cyber.law.harvard.edu\/blogs\/static\/dowbrigade\/annen1.jpg\")
Well, we managed to trim our sails to the point where we
\n could read those 75 pages, and after the second or third time through
\n they started to make some sense. We "studied" through the night, and
\n sailed in at 9 the next morning to take the exam, along with hundreds of other bright-eyed
\n young scholars in the vast hallowed cavern of Memorial Hall, and sailed
\n out about 90 minutes later, as soon as we saw the first few of our companions
\n start to bail to the right and to the left. As hard as we tried to force
\n our eyes and mind back to the scrawled figures in Blue Book, at that point the fractal photons
\n flowing through the spectacular stained glass windows on all sides of
\n us was much more interesting than pen marks on paper.<\/p>\n
The truth is that by that point we had already
\n regurgitated just about everything
\n we could
\n remember
\n from our perusal of the key three chapters, and any further work would have consisted of transparent rearrangement of cards already
\n on the table, the academic equivalent of moving your food around on your
\n plate when you
\n want to gag
\n at the
\n thought of another bite of candied yams.<\/p>\n
We were pretty sure we had failed at that point, but we
\n were glad we had gone through the exercise, as it was a real bonding
\n experience with our intellectually elusive roommate, and as it always feels
\n good to
\n give something your best shot, even when it is a desperate, adreneline-drenched
\n shot in the dark.<\/p>\n
The kicker was that when the grades came back a few weeks
\n later, the Dowbrigade was rewarded for his efforts with a well-deserved
\n B-. Brutus, who had of course written feverishly the entire three hours, cited
\n numerous additional sources and displayed a comprehensive command of
\n the field as well as a few original but well-founded theories on the subject, which
\n in some cases even disagreed with the professor’s, got a C+. We heard later,
\n from an authoritative source, that the professor let his grad students
\n grade the exams in his undergrad courses, and they knew the only
\n accepted
\n answer was lifted straight from the professors book. Divergence was clearly
\n mistaken and wrong, ignorant if not evil.<\/p>\n
This experience pretty much cured the Dowbrigade of the
\n last vestiges of respect for the illusion of ivy integrity, and about
\n time. Brutus, unfortunately, fell victim to a Polanskiesque weakness for teenaged
\n girls, and wound up getting involved with
\n a
\n 15-year-old Sheriff’s daughter. As a result he
\n spent
\n an extended stretch as a guest of the California Department of Corrections, where
\n his vast knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese Navigational History probably
\n proved less than invaluable. Perhaps "Coaching Principles and Strategies of
\n Basketball" would have been the wiser choice.<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There has been much attention in the past few days to an infamous final examination – 20 questions – which was administered at the conclusion of a course called "Coaching Principles and Strategies of Basketball" at the University of Georgia. … Continue reading