You’ve Found The Answer, But What Is The Question?

My brother is a professor at the University of Barcelona, and he teaches European Union Law, replacing a retiring professor who, according to the faculty, had slipped into a predictable pattern.

My brother didn’t really put much weight to this, until, when grading the written exam papers, he noticed that six different people had given the same exact wrong answer, all of them about a different section of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. He was baffled, so of course, when one such student asked for a meeting with him, he decided to get the bottom of this mystery.

Brother: “Ah, Mr. [Student], are you here to talk about your exam?”

Student: *Looking indignant.* “Yes, I am perplexed by my failing grade, and I would like an explanation.”

Browsing through the papers, he finds the student’s paper, and immediately points at the section that confused him:

Brother: “Well, let us start with this question, which was about how the articles in question were about the protection of free enterprise, but you claimed said articles were about EU employee harassment compensation instead.”

Student: *Looking stumped.* “Wait, what? Really? That’s not what the notes said!”

Brother: “May I see the notes, if you have them here with you?”

He did, and he discovered the previous retiring professor was very predictable in his exam questions. He literally proposed the same exact six questions year after year, and the students were now relying on a list of pre-packaged answers to pass.

With this mystery solved, he explained the shell-shocked, and a little bit daft, student the truth, and from that point onward he made sure to mention his exams weren’t going to have eternally-repeating questions, no matter what the notes sold on campus claimed.