Humor: An Update from University Plank

Krishna Khawani, Staff Writer 

 

plankDear Students,

We here at University Plank hope that you are staying safe during the COVID-19 crisis! Now while we understand that this may be a difficult time for many, we are here to let you know what you will still have the “opportunity” to take your Accelerated Position exam(s)! And by this we mean you are going to have to. But don’t worry, because we will do everything in our power to make sure that it will be an extremely stressful and uncomfortable process for as many of you as possible!

Starting off with the basics, we are going to be compressing your $100 assessment(s) down to 50 minutes, and either one or two free response questions! This may seem like an absurdly short amount of time, and we’re here to tell you that you’re right! Many of you may not be able to submit in time, but it is the only thing that we were able to come up with to prevent cheating in our 2 hour brainstorming session. Nevertheless, don’t fret! We will be sending out an incredible amount of preparation and resources for you to use that for some reason we have never made accessible before, even when the exams used to be technically harder!

Now that you are feeling a little unsure about your upcoming exam(s), let’s talk about the rules. These will be open-book and open-note, and we will even allow you to use Google, but remember that the time restrictions will be so constricting that this will not end up being helpful for the majority of you, so get ready to keep studying! While we do allow you to use the most knowledgeable database in the history of mankind, we will absolutely not allow you to consult with any other human being, because that would be a terribly unbalanced advantage. “How will you know if we do this?” you may be asking. Well, we may or may not have snuck in a little clause in the agreement you signed that allows us to record through your video camera and microphone, but don’t tell anyone!

We also have numerous other resources that we have put vast amounts of time and money into that will let us know if you are cheating! As University Plank, we have an obligation to make sure integrity is maintained, so we will infiltrate your social media through fake accounts and bait students into cheating! This may be questionable to you, but hey, we’re in charge here!

While we spent so much time on these ways to catch and prevent cheating, we did not focus too much on optimizing our servers and databases to allow for the millions of students trying to access their exam! As such, there will be a huge number of you that may finish your exam, and may have gotten a top score, but just won’t be able to submit because of a problem on our end! We will be offering a retest for those of you who experience technical difficulties, so get ready for another month of studying while all your friends relax! We will even try to distract you from this very obvious problem by bringing out some amazing celebrities like Lin-Manuel Miranda or John Quiñones!

We know that this was a long message, but we congratulate you for making it so far considering how many times you may have lost your mind while reading about our antics. As a “non-profit” that makes billions of dollars, we make it our first priority to keep our money, and then next on the list is all of you wonderful students! We hope that you continue studying, because we will know if you don’t! As time goes on we will come out with more updates, but as of now, good luck! We know that you’ll need it.

Sincerely,
University Plank