As much as we might have dreaded the exams of our youth, as usual, our early contemporaries had it worse. Take China, for example. The Imperial examination, or kējǔ (meaning, less grandly, "subject recommendation,") was a pre-Medieval set of exams that potential bureaucrats and state servants had to take. Candidates were practically locked in a compound for multiple days to prevent cheating. At least they were allowed to bring snacks and a chamber pot.

The whole event was so serious that candidates who died would have their corpses physically thrown out of the compound. While it’s unclear how often this actually happened, it seems that the stress and time requirements of the test must have claimed at least a few victims. Even if you were relatively healthy, there were other potential risks. The exam required direct, exact knowledge of Chinese classics. A misquote could get you disqualified. 

Europeans took a bit of a while to catch up. The University of Bologna is considered the longest still operational university in the world and there is some evidence that they had semi-formal examinations in the 12th century. Otherwise, European examinations were sporadic and not really unified, and only by the 18th century did the idea become more commonly practiced across multiple educational institutions, much to the continuous sorrow of most students.

Only in the 19th century, in British-ruled India of all places, did the idea of a mass, standardized competency exam reemerge. Since then it has been applied everywhere from civil service to grade schools. And if the ABCD-F grading system also creates some degree of revulsion, you can place the blame squarely on Mount Holyoke College of Massachusetts. While still common in the US, most places use a numeric system that is more intuitive and easy to calculate. 

Many of the drawings and comments here are more of a response to a somewhat desperate, similar drawing by a student. More enterprising students will, instead, cheat and probably try to draw, literally and figuratively, as little attention as they can to their answers. We all know the classic cheat sheets, smuggling in a phone, or some elaborate Morse code system that two or more students might employ. In countries spanning multiple time zones, Like Russia, or areas with standardized testing, like Singapore and the UK (and Hong Kong, back in the day,) where students “ahead” of others' time zones would just send images of the exam to later time zones. 

Setting aside cheating, the images, if not the direct content here is probably familiar to many. Math questions, essays. The multiple-choice seems like an oasis among these options. Just sit down and pick the one that seems the closest. Often, people report the idea that your instincts will guide you on a multiple-choice section. This is statistically false. While we all can remember one of those times we changed a correct answer to a wrong one, studies show that generally we do better on the second pass, it’s only those painful memories that distort our thinking. 

The other reason many of us felt some comfort in multiple-choice sections is the knowledge that one could still guess and hope for the best. Unfortunately, those dastardly pedagogical specialists have developed grading systems where the “score is reduced by the number of wrong answers divided by the average number of possible answers for all questions in the test.” In other words, no more easy points by just guessing.