It’s 2013. I’m sitting my final year exams at university. It’s a warm summer afternoon, and I walk into the exam hall of one of the most notoriously difficult papers. I’m not feeling confident. I open the paper.

It’s… remarkably familiar.

In the run-up to the exam, I’d been revising super hard (read: cramming. I hadn’t been quite as diligent with attending lectures as I perhaps should have been, giving me a show-up rate of ~0%.)

I didn’t even know where on the university website to find the previous years’ papers, so I’d just been Googling the course code and filetype:pdf. Plenty showed up.

It turns out, although the last 3 papers are linked to from the university website, the earlier ones are still floating around the Googles.

And the professor had decided to reuse the paper from 6 years earlier.

Which was still indexed by Google.

And which I happened to have studied in depth—together with the professor’s model answers—the morning of the exam¹.

1. The hardest part was that it said ‘Pick 3 of the 5 questions to answer’, and I had just read the professor’s model answers to all 5 of them, and I don’t want to be that melodramatic guy with the first-world problems but DECISION PARALYSIS IS REAL ↩