The Comp Exam Story I'll Never Forget
In this brief anecdote, the speaker recounts a graduate student's experience during a comprehensive exam where a question referenced a tax law year that was mistyped as 1979 instead of the correct 1978. Faced with the error and unable to seek clarification, the student chose to assume the intended year (1978) and answered accordingly, completing the exam successfully. Later, a reviewer noted that the student could have pointed out that no tax law existed in 1979, which would have been a valid answer but required the courage to challenge the exam wording. The story highlights the stress of high‑stakes testing, the split‑second judgment required when encountering ambiguous or erroneous exam items, and the trade‑off between pragmatic assumptions and bold clarification.
