Melmac 101

I probably would have failed professor Joseph Howley's first test if it had been offered to me as an undergrad.

Howley, in an attempt to reduce the number of people "shopping" his class by signing up but only intending to stay long enough to see if it was easy or not, hid an instruction in his syllabus directing his students to send him a picture of Alf, the puppet alien star of his own sitcom in the 1980s. As of the original story, eight students in his class of 20 had sent in the pictures, and even though it had gone viral, some 12 still had not when it ran last Tuesday.

Howley said he learned something interesting about his students: None of them knew who Alf was and they had not seen the show. He said it helped him get a picture of the age gap between himself and his students.

Similar ideas have been used before. For its 1982 tour, the band Van Halen had created a special stage and light show that required extra electrical capacity to properly work and a properly supported floor to hold its great weight. They included this information in the contract rider for the concert, but knew that many venues might not read it. So they also inserted the famous "no brown M&M's" rider to see if the staff at the venue had read the contract and made the necessary stage arrangements.

Now, as to the reasons I would have failed Professor Howley's test. The first was that I was probably not always a careful reader of syllabi as an undergraduate beyond noting the dates of tests and projects due. The second is probably a bigger hurdle: Alf did not debut until after I had graduated and I would not have known what in the world he was talking about.