President of the College Elizabeth Bradley revealed in her Oct. 20 Sunday email that all Vassar students would spend a class period this week taking a pop quiz about how their circle of friends spent the recent October Break, sending students into a panic.
“I mean, yeah, I asked my friends what they’d been getting up to, but I didn’t actually pay attention to the answers,” one hyperventilating junior told The Miscellany News. “Nobody told me I was going to be tested on it!”
The college has implemented a complex algorithm, written by professors in the Department of Computer Science, to select students’ whose October Break plans the student body should be quizzed on. The algorithm, which analyzes the totality of students’ movements on campus and online activity, consumed three gigawatts of electricity to run, and all of Sunset Lake was drained for the water to be used in cooling the servers.
“Good riddance,” a number of students told The Miscellany News in unison. “It smells weird.”
In any case, the quizzes have now been generated and have already been rolled out to some students. The Miscellany News asked students leaving the testing rooms for their reactions, and although most felt as though the program represented an uncalled-for intrusion on the part of the college into their personal lives, some took a more positive view.
“If you didn’t take notes on what your friends did last week, that’s totally on you,” one first-year student said. “I think people are just salty because they didn’t study.”
Dean of Studies Thomas Porcello concurred. “For far too long, there has been no accountability mechanism for students after they ask what their friends did over break,” he said. “This program will incentivize students to truly engage in active listening while their friends describe their experiences.”
The stakes are sky-high. Those who excel on the quiz will be rewarded with Brewer Bucks; those who fall short will see the failure recorded on their permanent record, commonly known as the “Fearlessly Consequential File.”
Most students say that this is the last time they’ll be caught off guard in this fashion.
“I know what I’m doing next October,” one said.
“I’ll be perched in a tree across the street from my friend Ralph’s house, binoculars trained on his bedroom window.”