Secret 13…I once cheated in an exam
Posted under 30 Secrets in 30 Days, Uncategorized
When I say ‘cheated’, I prefer to think of it as ‘improvised’ although deep down I know that it was cheating. Tut tut, tush and fie.
About a million years ago I read music at university. During our first year we had to do a number of tedious, compulsory ‘modules’ such as composing, conducting, orchestration and tape composition (more of which later). What an utter chore. All I was interested in was singing, playing the flute, floating around campus in my Laura Ashley skirts and hanging out in the medics bar.
Anyway I muddled my way through it reasonably well, but tape composition got the better of me. i just didn’t get it. Mainly it involved recording sounds like a door shutting, one beat of a drum, a dripping tap, a first year music student slipping silently in to a catatonic state through sheer boredom etc, on tape and then manipulating the sounds in to something vaguely toe tapping. Well what’s the point of that? Why not just pop on an LP (CDs very much in their infancy in those days) and listen to that instead?
I just couldn’t get my head around what I was supposed to be doing, and the studio terrified me…full of reels of tape, scalpels for cutting it,weirdy beardy sweaty ‘studio’ guys and scary signs ‘DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES TURN OFF THE STUDIO WITHOUT TURNING THE SPEAKERS OFF FIRST OTHERWISE YOU WILL BLOW THEM’.
As the year rolled on it became apparent that I was totally incapable of putting together the 3 minute composition required of me for the end of year assessment. So I panicked, and then I improvised.
I dug around in the studio bin and found a length of disgarded tape, someone else’s rejected work. I then recorded it backwards (cunning), sampled various bits, shoved those in, speeded up some bits and with a flourish of brilliance, added in my own ending. Job done. A 3 minute masterpiece of which approximately 10 seconds was all my own worn. Roll over Beethoven.
If I could have cheated in my Keyboard Harmony exam the following year I would have done. I finished ‘playing’ (think, plinky plonk, plinky plonk), got up from the piano and turned round to find all 3 examiners with their heads in their hands. I failed. Spectacularly.
Well, what goes around comes around.
Cheating is just another word for ‘rescuing forgotten work from the bin’ and then mislabeling it with your own name. :)
I used to write term papers and sell them to my schoolmates. A girl has to pay for a car somehow, right?
Dude. You studied the coolest thing ever.
I would love to have had my studies include anything that involved digging in the dumpster to be able to cheat. I had to go on the internet to do that.
Not really (a waiver).
And can I just say the lengths you went to with that ‘recycled’ piece of tape sound damn impressive to the untrained ear – and I use the phrase in every sense of the word.
Recording backwards, sampling, shoving, speeding etc etc.
Wow.
back in the day, I didn’t feel like reading a book for a book report where we had to take a project “in”. so I borrowed my brother’s stamp collection and looked up a stamp collection book title in the library. I got an “A”
Innovative, i like that!
Recycled, yes I like that. I didn’t cheat…I ‘recycled’..!
Ha ha, I’m so old that the internet wasn’t even INVENTED when I was at university. I’m ancient…
Nice, I like that….resourceful…
cheated has such a bad connotation…recycled sounds much better :)
it wasn’t really an exam, but i once wrote a paper on ulysses (a really like long 25-page paper) for a graduate course at snotty elite american university and i hadn’t read the the whole thing, i probably hadn’t even read half of it. and it was the only book we had to read during the whole quarter. that’s pretty much cheating, isn’t it?
again, i like that the self-portrait is slightly blurred, as if the camera caught you off guard…”cheating”