We hacked the exam today !

Today I had an exam . And it was no ordinary exam .. in more than one way ..

The subject 'Graph algorithms' is supposedly the most difficult paper in the final year of engineering .. The teacher had literally told us that he didn't expect us to attempt more than one question out of the three that were going to come .. The first one was about applying what he had taught (which no one had understood) and the next two were about proposing our own algorithms and analyzing them ..time and space complexity ..phew

But what happened today changed the way I ll ever give an exam again ..

I had tried to study whatever was taught by him in the lectures two days back and since then , having discussed and taught the same to like 50 odd people I was quite confident in the first question of the paper .. but still I felt uneasy as I relied only on the 1st question and assumed no one is going to do the rest correctly as prophecised , and that just makes u feel uneasy !

So here is what I did today .. I sat down with my friend in his room , locked the door , and started researching ..

Not on the subject content , but on the question paper .. we reviewed a whole bunch of questions , traced out our professor's undergrad university , looked for the subjects he studied and the questions he got ! .. and finally we narrowed down our choice to 3 questions we thought would 'most probably' be asked in the exam 3 hours later . finding the answers was not easy , but after 3 hours we had 4 - 5 pages of solutions thanks to google .. I love google , I do !

After 3 hrs of hard research work , we fancied our chances .. and we celebrated as if we had figured out the most difficult paper we were going to give in univ, just for fun..

What happened a few mins later when the exam started is .. yeah u guessed right .. we got them ! we got them ALL !! The first quesion was 30 marks application and most people should have done that one .. but the next two ( 35 marks each ) were the top 2 candidate questions from our list of 3 !!!

I just couldnt believe my luck .. the last question had really difficult and hard to find solutions on the net , and I found out the history of the problem from one of the research papers .. and I wrote down the first solution provided to that problem and for messing with the teacher I even wrote down the name of the person who proposed it along with the year in my answer :D

I was the first one to come out of the exam hall .. and I couldnt wait to celebrate with my friend and accomplice :P .. it was a wonderful end to a hectic day !