Similar Attitudes, Different Expectations

It's been a while.

          I was raised by a father who always wanted the answer to the question asked.  If he asked, "What are you doing?" he didn't want an excuse, he wanted to know what you were doing.  This became a thing in my family:

"Do you know what time it is?"

"Yes."

"...What time is it?"

That kind of thing had a profound impact on how I deal with professors and other people in authoritative positions.

          In high school, my physics teacher was much the same way as my father.  He would give very direct answers to exactly the question asked and expected us to do the same.  To be honest, he sometimes didn't word things particularly well, so the questions he asked and the ones he meant to ask were occasionally different, but it was solid for the most part.  The experience with this teacher further reinforced my answering habits.

          Then I got to college.  Here, I have a professor of Physics of Sound who seems very similar in mentality to my high school physics teacher, but who doesn't have the same emphasis on precise questioning.  We had a test a few weeks back, and she prefaced it by saying that it was an essay/short answer test.  Makes sense: multiple choice is traditionally too easy.  There were a few questions that said, "name and describe [x] and [y]," so I did that in a short answer format, true to the question.  The problem came when there were a few questions that said things like, "what are the three stages of [x]?" or, "does [x] affect [y]?"  Those questions did not ask for an explanation, so I didn't provide one.  This was the wrong decision.  Evidently, this professor explicitly stated the "explain" on some questions and implied it on the rest.  When I got the test back, I hadn't done poorly, but I had lost some points because I answered the question asked.  (Granted, on one I accidentally just made a list instead of writing in sentences, but I think that was less the issue on that one.)  When I asked the professor about this, she said, "I told you it was an essay test," and left it at that.  This explanation didn't really help, because I had answered the question she had asked, and my answer was correct.  It sharply contrasted with how I've learned to deal with essay tests, and I'm kind of uneasy about the whole thing.  And I'm going to be late to class.  Have fun, all.