8 ms·

Reminds me of the apocryphal story of the visibly nervous PhD student who walks into their thesis oral defense and sets down an expensive bottle of aged single

Reminds me of the apocryphal story of the visibly nervous PhD student who walks into their thesis oral defense and sets down an expensive bottle of aged single malt whisky. The chair asks, "Before we begin, I am curious why you brought a bottle of whisky to your defense?" The student suddenly relaxes and says, "Oh, um, I'll explain after we finish." The student confidently answers all the committee's questions and the defense goes smoothly. When they conclude, the chair prompts, "Say, what about the whisky?" The student replies, "Oh that. In my dissertation on page four it says I will give the whisky to the first committee member who asks for it."

michaelcampbell 5y ago
It reminds me of a story that a PhD student stuck a $10 (the value varies) bill into the copy of their thesis that got filed in the library. Some <large # of> years later, they came back to see that no one had taken it.
- owlninja 5y ago
  This sort of just happened and made news. A professor left clues to money in his syllabus and no one got it. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065723014/tennessee-professor-hid-a-cash-p https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065723014/tennessee-professo...
  - smallpipe 5y ago
    And the actual “clue” looked like a borked copy paste in the part of the syllabus telling you about university wide policies that the student would have read elsewhere already. But sure lazy students don’t read the syllabus
  - smcl 5y ago
    Yeah this was a little viral hit that went down well with boomers, but it was pretty sneaky. Everyone seems to be suggesting that if the kids these days just did what they were supposed to then they could have scored a crisp $50 and had all the avocado toast they ever wanted. But where exactly was the text and how did the students miss it? These articles say it was "in the syllabus" but don't really go much further. I don't have access to the full syllabus but a snippet showing its immediate surroundings is available: ... objectives. As a result, skill-based courses in music may be exempt from Covid-related accomodations as a progression in skills must be obtained across the semester to be successfull in these course. Thus (free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five), students may be ineligible to make up classes and coursework beyond the specified number of days as determined by the instructor. Requests will be decided on a case-by-case basis with specific emphasis on the ability to achieve learning outcomes. Technology Support: If you have problems with your UTC email ... So it was right near the "please contact the tech support department if you need tech support" message. Basically it's in some boilerplate that every course has and nobody reads because they want to actually do their work and don't expect some professor to try to score internet points by pranking them this way. NPR could've done exactly the same thing on that article by adding a clause to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy docs that are linked, but which we all probably ignored and just clicked "Agree and Continue" to view the article.
    - Frondo 5y ago
      It's not just that it's embedded in some of the university boilerplate that the students probably have on all their syllabuses, it's that it doesn't read like anything, certainly not a promise of a free $50. Is it a typo? A copy-paste error? Only knowing that "free to the first who claims" is part of a boomer gotcha for kids these days does that whole parenthetical make any sense to me.
      - wccrawford 5y ago
        Also, if I read that, I would assume that figuring out where I needed to go and actually taking time to do that would end up in nothing, so I wouldn't bother. I wouldn't expect to get rich off it, and the chance at (apparently) $50 wouldn't excite me enough for me to waste my time on it.
        dlhavema 5y ago
        When i was in college, a chance at say 50$ would totally tempt me to spend a few hours hunting around campus ( Arizona State Uni for me ), i made ~$8 an hour at the time
        Frondo 5y ago
        Sure, it could be a fun thing to do (I'd have done a little treasure hunt for $50, too), but the professor's syllabus doesn't say it's $50 at all. "Free to the first who claims" -- claims what? free what? It isn't even a complete sentence, in the middle of boilerplate that's if anything exceedingly verbose. It doesn't parse like meaningful instructions. That's why I think it's a hokey gotcha, and not an actual sign of "people don't read instructions" (which we all instinctively know anyway??)
    - II2II 5y ago
      Sigh. I never had such luck. During a first year university computer science course, students were told to line up and sign an agreement for access to department computer labs. Most of the students lined up, grabbed the paperwork when they reached the front of the queue, then promptly signed it. I decided to actually read the paperwork, which earned me the privilege of standing at the side until the task was complete. No sneaky clauses, for the better or the worse, in my humble opinion. I simply had the privilege of standing out. Not that it really mattered. I walked away learning a different lesson since I already had access to their computer systems. I already asked for permission to access their systems, and was granted permission without doing the paperwork. For the most part, these agreements are intended to handle the typical case, and are meant to inform rather than be a rigid contract. (The irony: I consider trust as sacrosanct, so I often over comply with the rules.)
  - kovvy 5y ago
    Many people put answers to assignments and exams in the course material and very few people get it.
    - dlhavema 5y ago
      Is this a clever way of saying "studying"? :)
    - annecruz1996 5y ago
      I think I remember a story about a professor that said they can stop taking the exam and turn it in if they read a sentence in the exam which was placed like halfway through and only a few people in the class actually did that.
    - sverhagen 5y ago
      Isn't that kinda the point of these materials in the first place? :)
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  I’m pretty sure phd dissertation hard copies are never read over in the library anymore. Digital downloads only.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    Were they ever read? An amusing counter example - I was asked to proof a students assignment. I did and the essay seemed weird and I couldn’t work out why, but the content was ok. Some hours later I realised the work was mine, and had been placed in the library as an example of something (presumably anonymised). Good times.
  - atrettel 5y ago
    Well, I do not think I have ever read a dissertation from cover to cover that I checked out from the library, but I did read several substantial sections of quite a few when I was in graduate school. These ones were older and not yet digitized (1960s to 1980s). I had to request them from storage and read them in a reading room. I was just looking for certain kinds of experimental data for my own research and had no reason to read them cover to cover. I agree that people rarely check out hard copies of dissertations anymore but certainly many people do from time to time when needed.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      Were these the original hard copies each graduating PhD student must file after they’ve defended? That would involve physically going to some random university to physically check out some random person’s dissertation where the dissertation wasn’t notable enough to be available online. I just can’t see that happening, unless somehow the university you were studying at had the random dissertations that you wanted to read. If it wasn’t the original hard copy but a copy then I don’t think the $20 bill would be there regardless.
      - atrettel 5y ago
        Yes, these were the original hard copies. I was only talking about dissertations filed at the school I went to, so I fortunately did not have to go anywhere. I just had to put in the request and wait a day or two for them to arrive at the reading room from storage. You are correct that getting dissertations from far off universities is often impossible. Many universities do not loan their dissertations via interlibrary loan, so unless it is online or you are willing to travel to their campus, you can't get access to it. ProQuest is another option, but they do not have everything and it costs money. I've heard the 20 dollar bill story many times but I have never found anything like that in an original hard-copy dissertation. If I recall correctly, I have found things used as bookmarks, like receipts or scraps of paper, and the cards in the back cover are often stamped at least once a decade. That seems to suggest that other people have read them over the years, just not as often as other materials.
- dhosek 5y ago
  I had heard that some MFA student had written in the library copy of his thesis, “if you’re reading this, I guess I’m famous now.” Alas, I was part of the two MFA cohorts whose theses were electronically filed which means that it’s unlikely anyone will ever read it even if I did become famous.
- dnautics 5y ago
  We had a PhD student who removed a random different page from his thesis that got sent to each of his committee members. I went into my thesis with a preprint of a paper exposing a fraud in my thesis chair's lab, literally in my back pocket... As a confidence booster.
- cafard 5y ago
  When editor of The New Republic, Michael Kinsley would go to Olsson's, which then had the biggest bookstores in Washington, DC, and leave slips redeemable for $10 or $20 inside copies of the books that "everyone" was taking about and supposedly reading. He never had to pay out.
sharkweek 5y ago
I remember in maybe middle school a teacher giving everyone in the class a piece of paper with a massive list of instructions. They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.” But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.” The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.” About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny I remember.
- thelopa 5y ago
  One of my teachers did that in elementary school. I read the whole thing, saw the final instruction, and then got confused about what order I should follow the instructions in. The instructions were clearly contradictory and as a result there wasn’t an unambiguous way to interpret the paper. I had recently started playing with programming, and so I decided to model the task as though I was a computer executing a program. I started at the top and did all the silly instructions. Besides, it was more fun that way. Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.
  - IgorPartola 5y ago
    That’s when you run around smacking everyone and yelling “undefined behavior!”
  - laurent92 5y ago
    I had a class where we would need to write Assembly code on paper, then copy the result into the question sheet and hand it in. Of course, there was a social convention that the program itself would be turned in too, but it clearly wasn’t written in the instruction sheet, and of course I, as a geek, lacked the social conventions, so we respected the absence of instruction and didn’t turn in the Assembly code (The teacher was a miserable authoritarian). Our grade came in: Zero. Not even 10 out of 20 for answering the instruction sheet. Add insult to injury, the teacher was a feminist who worked to improve girls’ grades, so a group of girls did the same as us, but recovered their points because “they asked nicely”. So they had 17/20. We got 10/20 “because half an assignment is still half an assignment.”
sharkweek 5y ago
I remember in maybe middle school a teacher giving everyone in the class a piece of paper with a massive list of instructions. They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.” But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.” The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.” About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny.
- howdydoo 5y ago
  Two different teachers did this at my school (two years in a row). The second year, nobody fell for it. I felt a little bad for that teacher.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    I suppose the teacher was glad though.
  - wccrawford 5y ago
    Yeah, I had that about 3 or 4 times in school. By the third one, people were just flat telling the ones that fell for it not to continue, and why.
    - O_H_E 5y ago
      Lmao, sounds like it went viral with a certain demographic
- cafard 5y ago
  Yep, early 6th grade for me.
nine_k 5y ago
In my university, in the department where I worked as a post-grad, worked someone who had pulled such a trick in their dissertation. That person was later hired by the university, worked for some years, and was suddenly confronted by a colleague who demanded the bottle. That dissertation actually contained something on the topic of their research, and that page finally found its reader. (Yes, that guy did produce the bottle as promised, from his words.)
neilv 5y ago
The version I recall was something like a doctoral candidate shows up to their defense, points out that no member of their committee had claimed the free bottle of scotch mentioned in their dissertation (implying no one on the committee had read the diss. closely), and so candidate was allowed to drink the scotch during the defense.

michaelcampbell 5y ago

It reminds me of a story that a PhD student stuck a $10 (the value varies) bill into the copy of their thesis that got filed in the library. Some <large # of> years later, they came back to see that no one had taken it.

owlninja 5y ago
This sort of just happened and made news. A professor left clues to money in his syllabus and no one got it. https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065723014/tennessee-professor-hid-a-cash-p https://www.npr.org/2021/12/20/1065723014/tennessee-professo...
- smallpipe 5y ago
  And the actual “clue” looked like a borked copy paste in the part of the syllabus telling you about university wide policies that the student would have read elsewhere already. But sure lazy students don’t read the syllabus
- smcl 5y ago
  Yeah this was a little viral hit that went down well with boomers, but it was pretty sneaky. Everyone seems to be suggesting that if the kids these days just did what they were supposed to then they could have scored a crisp $50 and had all the avocado toast they ever wanted. But where exactly was the text and how did the students miss it? These articles say it was "in the syllabus" but don't really go much further. I don't have access to the full syllabus but a snippet showing its immediate surroundings is available: ... objectives. As a result, skill-based courses in music may be exempt from Covid-related accomodations as a progression in skills must be obtained across the semester to be successfull in these course. Thus (free to the first who claims; locker one hundred forty-seven; combination fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five), students may be ineligible to make up classes and coursework beyond the specified number of days as determined by the instructor. Requests will be decided on a case-by-case basis with specific emphasis on the ability to achieve learning outcomes. Technology Support: If you have problems with your UTC email ... So it was right near the "please contact the tech support department if you need tech support" message. Basically it's in some boilerplate that every course has and nobody reads because they want to actually do their work and don't expect some professor to try to score internet points by pranking them this way. NPR could've done exactly the same thing on that article by adding a clause to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy docs that are linked, but which we all probably ignored and just clicked "Agree and Continue" to view the article.
  - Frondo 5y ago
    It's not just that it's embedded in some of the university boilerplate that the students probably have on all their syllabuses, it's that it doesn't read like anything, certainly not a promise of a free $50. Is it a typo? A copy-paste error? Only knowing that "free to the first who claims" is part of a boomer gotcha for kids these days does that whole parenthetical make any sense to me.
    - wccrawford 5y ago
      Also, if I read that, I would assume that figuring out where I needed to go and actually taking time to do that would end up in nothing, so I wouldn't bother. I wouldn't expect to get rich off it, and the chance at (apparently) $50 wouldn't excite me enough for me to waste my time on it.
      - dlhavema 5y ago
        When i was in college, a chance at say 50$ would totally tempt me to spend a few hours hunting around campus ( Arizona State Uni for me ), i made ~$8 an hour at the time
        Frondo 5y ago
        Sure, it could be a fun thing to do (I'd have done a little treasure hunt for $50, too), but the professor's syllabus doesn't say it's $50 at all. "Free to the first who claims" -- claims what? free what? It isn't even a complete sentence, in the middle of boilerplate that's if anything exceedingly verbose. It doesn't parse like meaningful instructions. That's why I think it's a hokey gotcha, and not an actual sign of "people don't read instructions" (which we all instinctively know anyway??)
  - II2II 5y ago
    Sigh. I never had such luck. During a first year university computer science course, students were told to line up and sign an agreement for access to department computer labs. Most of the students lined up, grabbed the paperwork when they reached the front of the queue, then promptly signed it. I decided to actually read the paperwork, which earned me the privilege of standing at the side until the task was complete. No sneaky clauses, for the better or the worse, in my humble opinion. I simply had the privilege of standing out. Not that it really mattered. I walked away learning a different lesson since I already had access to their computer systems. I already asked for permission to access their systems, and was granted permission without doing the paperwork. For the most part, these agreements are intended to handle the typical case, and are meant to inform rather than be a rigid contract. (The irony: I consider trust as sacrosanct, so I often over comply with the rules.)
- kovvy 5y ago
  Many people put answers to assignments and exams in the course material and very few people get it.
  - dlhavema 5y ago
    Is this a clever way of saying "studying"? :)
  - annecruz1996 5y ago
    I think I remember a story about a professor that said they can stop taking the exam and turn it in if they read a sentence in the exam which was placed like halfway through and only a few people in the class actually did that.
  - sverhagen 5y ago
    Isn't that kinda the point of these materials in the first place? :)
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
I’m pretty sure phd dissertation hard copies are never read over in the library anymore. Digital downloads only.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  Were they ever read? An amusing counter example - I was asked to proof a students assignment. I did and the essay seemed weird and I couldn’t work out why, but the content was ok. Some hours later I realised the work was mine, and had been placed in the library as an example of something (presumably anonymised). Good times.
- atrettel 5y ago
  Well, I do not think I have ever read a dissertation from cover to cover that I checked out from the library, but I did read several substantial sections of quite a few when I was in graduate school. These ones were older and not yet digitized (1960s to 1980s). I had to request them from storage and read them in a reading room. I was just looking for certain kinds of experimental data for my own research and had no reason to read them cover to cover. I agree that people rarely check out hard copies of dissertations anymore but certainly many people do from time to time when needed.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    Were these the original hard copies each graduating PhD student must file after they’ve defended? That would involve physically going to some random university to physically check out some random person’s dissertation where the dissertation wasn’t notable enough to be available online. I just can’t see that happening, unless somehow the university you were studying at had the random dissertations that you wanted to read. If it wasn’t the original hard copy but a copy then I don’t think the $20 bill would be there regardless.
    - atrettel 5y ago
      Yes, these were the original hard copies. I was only talking about dissertations filed at the school I went to, so I fortunately did not have to go anywhere. I just had to put in the request and wait a day or two for them to arrive at the reading room from storage. You are correct that getting dissertations from far off universities is often impossible. Many universities do not loan their dissertations via interlibrary loan, so unless it is online or you are willing to travel to their campus, you can't get access to it. ProQuest is another option, but they do not have everything and it costs money. I've heard the 20 dollar bill story many times but I have never found anything like that in an original hard-copy dissertation. If I recall correctly, I have found things used as bookmarks, like receipts or scraps of paper, and the cards in the back cover are often stamped at least once a decade. That seems to suggest that other people have read them over the years, just not as often as other materials.
dhosek 5y ago
I had heard that some MFA student had written in the library copy of his thesis, “if you’re reading this, I guess I’m famous now.” Alas, I was part of the two MFA cohorts whose theses were electronically filed which means that it’s unlikely anyone will ever read it even if I did become famous.
dnautics 5y ago
We had a PhD student who removed a random different page from his thesis that got sent to each of his committee members. I went into my thesis with a preprint of a paper exposing a fraud in my thesis chair's lab, literally in my back pocket... As a confidence booster.
cafard 5y ago
When editor of The New Republic, Michael Kinsley would go to Olsson's, which then had the biggest bookstores in Washington, DC, and leave slips redeemable for $10 or $20 inside copies of the books that "everyone" was taking about and supposedly reading. He never had to pay out.

sharkweek 5y ago

I remember in maybe middle school a teacher giving everyone in the class a piece of paper with a massive list of instructions. They were silly things like “sing the first Ceres of your favorite song” or “do 10 jumping jacks.” But the first instruction was “read all the instructions first before doing anything listed here.” The last instruction being, “ignore all of the above and hand in your paper.” About 3/4 of the class ignored the first instructions and went through all the silly stuff. Was pretty funny I remember.

thelopa 5y ago
One of my teachers did that in elementary school. I read the whole thing, saw the final instruction, and then got confused about what order I should follow the instructions in. The instructions were clearly contradictory and as a result there wasn’t an unambiguous way to interpret the paper. I had recently started playing with programming, and so I decided to model the task as though I was a computer executing a program. I started at the top and did all the silly instructions. Besides, it was more fun that way. Afterwards the teacher chided everyone who didn’t read the entire paper before starting and did the silly instructions. I was bothered because I had read the paper and thought carefully about how I would handle it. I still think that assignment was dumb.
- IgorPartola 5y ago
  That’s when you run around smacking everyone and yelling “undefined behavior!”
- laurent92 5y ago
  I had a class where we would need to write Assembly code on paper, then copy the result into the question sheet and hand it in. Of course, there was a social convention that the program itself would be turned in too, but it clearly wasn’t written in the instruction sheet, and of course I, as a geek, lacked the social conventions, so we respected the absence of instruction and didn’t turn in the Assembly code (The teacher was a miserable authoritarian). Our grade came in: Zero. Not even 10 out of 20 for answering the instruction sheet. Add insult to injury, the teacher was a feminist who worked to improve girls’ grades, so a group of girls did the same as us, but recovered their points because “they asked nicely”. So they had 17/20. We got 10/20 “because half an assignment is still half an assignment.”

sharkweek 5y ago

howdydoo 5y ago
Two different teachers did this at my school (two years in a row). The second year, nobody fell for it. I felt a little bad for that teacher.
- nine_k 5y ago
  I suppose the teacher was glad though.
- wccrawford 5y ago
  Yeah, I had that about 3 or 4 times in school. By the third one, people were just flat telling the ones that fell for it not to continue, and why.
  - O_H_E 5y ago
    Lmao, sounds like it went viral with a certain demographic
cafard 5y ago
Yep, early 6th grade for me.

nine_k 5y ago

In my university, in the department where I worked as a post-grad, worked someone who had pulled such a trick in their dissertation. That person was later hired by the university, worked for some years, and was suddenly confronted by a colleague who demanded the bottle. That dissertation actually contained something on the topic of their research, and that page finally found its reader. (Yes, that guy did produce the bottle as promised, from his words.)

neilv 5y ago

The version I recall was something like a doctoral candidate shows up to their defense, points out that no member of their committee had claimed the free bottle of scotch mentioned in their dissertation (implying no one on the committee had read the diss. closely), and so candidate was allowed to drink the scotch during the defense.