I'm grading finals, conservatively over 100 of them (about 8 pages each), and it's funny to read the little comments they throw down on paper, usually in a state of horror or resignation. I'll post a few.
"My favorite quote from Hamlet: '
Words, words, words.'" The rest of this page was left blank. Oops.
On one of the exams, the students have to write a program in Visual Basic. Here is the name of his function: "Sub Not_Cool()" Another student named his function "Sub Winner()" which I thought was a little more optimistic.
He continued to rant elsewhere: "I'm not familiar with Euler's method and don't exactly know when to stop, whether it's at equation 1 or 2. Either way, the method is either perfect or way off." How true that is.
Later, he responded to the question "What will [the matrix] U look like at each step?" with :(
In the same section, another kid wrote of this problem "I understand. Not really."
A girl in the class invoked a higher power and wrote the Latin "
Soli Deo Gloria" in frilly script with an accompanying bland starburst reminiscent of a 6-pointed version you'd find standard in PowerPoint document. God can't help you here, Megan.
I got a "Yo Dawg" on the front of another's cover page where this phrase was pointing to the word "Final." Apparently he was excited to be rid of this class. Previously, this semester, we had a five-ish minute discussion of the "Yo Dawg" Xzibit meme which these 18 year olds were shocked that someone twice their age was even aware of. The discussion morphed into some light 4-chan/Anonymous talk, and I think it was that day when they discovered I was deeply entrenched in the Matrix and probably shouldn't be messed with.
The oddest thing I've seen (to this point, I'm about 1/3 of the way done) was someone who wrote "5% ≠ 20%" next to a problem which was declared to be worth 20%. He wrote this once, erased it, and re-wrote it. Is there some niche Occupy movement I'm not currently aware of?
More to come, probably..