I just took my second exam in my controls class. Somehow, I’ve managed two straight times to convince myself I understood the material well enough to do great on an exam. That, and he allowed us to have a table of integrals, a table of Laplace transforms, and a crib sheet filled with equations (plus a matrix algebra crib sheet).
Somehow, I still managed to find that the determinant of a matrix was zero, so the inverse didn’t exist, and had to hope that I managed to clip that curveball into at least a base hit. Then, from out of left field came hyperbolic sine! What the. . . !? I don’t think I’ve seen one of those since orbital mechanics class back in 1994. By the way, the table of integrals weren’t quite as helpful as a table of derivatives would have been!
As long as there are exams, there will be prayer in school. Or at the testing center on base.