Tests and Patterns

In college I took a basic economics class. I've had better classes. One of the things I didn't like about the class was that the tests were super boring. 50 multiple choice, and that's it. I got so bored taking them. To make them bearable I would skip around, do a couple per page, skip to the end and do them backwards, or do one question per page. They were still boring, I would find myself reading the questions several times before finally focusing enough to comprehend what I was reading. Which means I took longer to take the tests than most people, but I couldn't help it. I was so excited at the end of the semester when the professor said we didn't have to take the final if we had a good enough grade. Hurrah! No more boring tests.
I think it's kind of weird to get bored taking tests, but because I do it made me observe tests more. Like checking to see if the scantron sheets spell BAD or DAD or FAD or BAA. Also, I found it entertaining to try and guess the answer by the way the question and the options were phrased or set up, and then compare it to what I would choose looking at what I thought was the right answer.
That tendency probably would have got me into trouble if I hadn't already learned that sometimes the patterns do not point to the right answer.
When I was in first grade I remember taking a quiz. It was a photocopied page filled with handwritten sentences with blanks. A simple fill in the blank with the answers/options at the bottom of the page to choose from. I didn't read any of the sentences, instead I put the longest words in the longest blanks, the shortest in the shortest. I failed the quiz.
That didn't stop me from looking for the patterns in tests, instead it was my backup method to finding or checking my answers. I never let it be my first method again. At least if I did, it never ended so badly again :).