It's Exam Week at Old Ivy. Crunch time has arrived.
Let's recap the way things work at Old Ivy. To graduate, students must pass a series of exams. To help students prepare for the exams, the College offers a number of lectures and seminars, but students are not obligated to attend; they are welcome to study on their own or pay for a tutor.
The lectures at Old Ivy are delivered by adjunct faculty and are open to all students. Seminars, on the other hand, are limited to the twelve students with the highest exam scores in the previous level; they are led by senior faculty. Since the senior faculty write the exams, a seminar seat is highly coveted as the professors tend to drop helpful hints about what will be on the exam at the end of the semester. It's a virtuous circle; do well on the first exam and you get into a seminar, which improves your chances of doing well on the next exam.
Senior faculty can admit more students to the seminar at their own discretion. However, students must meet with the professor at the beginning of the semester and demonstrate to the professor's satisfaction that they merit special admission. Old Ivy's Board of Directors has no knowledge of the seemingly affluent lifestyles of senior faculty (considering the low pay), nor are they aware of the puzzling incidence in seminars of attractive young women who seem much less well-prepared than the other students.
Students who do not do so well on the exam must make do with the lectures, which are pretty good, but since the lecturers don't write the exams they can't drop hints. Alternatively, students can hire tutors. There is a cottage industry of tutors -- most of whom are upperclassmen or Old Ivy graduates -- in the vicinity of the college.
The Logic exam was yesterday, and Roderick nailed it. Rhetoric and Mathematics will be tomorrow morning and afternoon, respectively. Elective exams are next week; Roderick has History of Banking on Monday, and Molly has Counterpoint on Tuesday. Then it's off to Beauneville in the Roadmaster.
Roderick and Molly agree to sleep separately through Exam Week, so they won't distract one another with thoughts about doing what people do in the back seat of a Roadmaster. Lily Chang has kindly offered to come over and help Roderick study for Rhetoric, so now she sits next to Roderick on the bed as they review the work of the Sophists, Isocrates, Plato and Aristotle, and Roderick contemplates how surprisingly buxom Lily is for an Asian girl from Minneapolis.
Lily stretches, then begins to remove her shirt. "Do you mind if we study naked?" she inquires. "I think it's so much more relaxing, don't you?"
Roderick doesn't mind at all.
