Pierre Menard, Author of the 15-122 Final
Long before a student has even enrolled in 15-122, it is guaranteed they have already contemplated and come to dread the class. It’s encountered in rumors and Reddit threads long before a student even sets foot on campus. By the time one is ready to take it, the class has achieved an almost theological status. Most students cope by studying. The rest cope by not.
Enter Pierre Menard, a sophomore who rejected studying. His method was more … Iliano-esque. He adopted a French accent, began speaking about linked lists to an audience of first-years, and stood in front of large crowds that were smaller every week. He even went so far as to compel his friends to pretend to grade check-ins, so that he could supervise them. For weeks, thus, he relived the professor’s life exactly.
By the night before the exam, there was no meaningful difference between Menard and Iliano, except in matters of payroll. Seated alone in Gates, he closed his eyes and reconstructed the exam from first principles: a sorting problem, for sure, one that would tempt the naive into answering it took quadratic time. Then some bitcode operations, painfully time-consuming but utterly simple. And so on and so forth. He wrote down all the answers, triumphant, and memorized them.
The next morning, Menard opened the exam. The first problem was, indeed, on sorting. He had never learned to sort. He had learned the act of teaching sorting and of being Iliano and of being Iliano learning sorting. He had learned the gestures that would produce the answer so thoroughly the answer itself was a meaningless output. As he stared at the page, he – though it could not be said whether this thought came from what remained of Menard or from what had arisen of Iliano – realized, with complete clarity, the optimal strategy would have been to study, instead of concocting an elaborate scheme to complete the course without doing the work as intended and learning the content. But he passed nonetheless.