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Comment by masterzora | Hacker News Reader

> I was fortunate to be a student of Dr. Bose many years ago. No other professor gave unlimited time on exams, plus free Toscanini's ice cream to boot!

Unlimited time and free food is a good thing? I went to Harvey Mudd and the only thing more terrifying than an unlimited time exam was an unlimited time exam with free food. It was a surefire indicator that you were about to lose a significant chunk of your time working on a nigh-impossible exam. I guess it's just weird to find out that this isn't universal.

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Those were great perks since no other classes I knew had them. Bose didn't offer these things so he could have impossible exams. He offered them because he was cool like that. :)

If you knew your materials, it would have taken about 1 to 1.5 hrs to finish the exam. The vast majority finished within 2 hrs (typical duration of MIT night exams). But indeed there were a few who stuck around for 4-5 hrs. At least one TA had to stick around too.

Ah, that's a much different case. There's a (true) horror story about an upper division physics course at Harvey Mudd. It was an unlimited time proctored exam. The prof apparently expected the students to spend 4-5 hours, but when nobody had left by then he had to order some pizzas to feed them. If I remember the story correctly, most of the students exceeded 20 hours and, I might be making this up, but I believe a couple got into the 40-some range.

This isn't really the usual case (most of the unlimited time exams are take home exams rather than proctored), but it's still terrifying.

>But indeed there were a few who stuck around for 4-5 hrs. At least one TA had to stick around too.

In one of our exams, there was supposedly a student who remained in the hall until 3 or 4am. It was unlimited time and s/he decided to take advantage of it. I took the class pass/fail (I was an Mech E so I didn't have a great background in the advanced EE stuff underpinning some of the concepts) so I always left sooner than I really should have since I didn't sweat the small stuff.

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