Students Talk about Infinite Series

A few Calc 2 students were sitting outside my office studying for the last exam in their class. (By tradition, we try to have the last regular exam of the semester be as late as possible so that most of the material on the final has already been tested on a regular exam. Today is the last day to give an exam that counts for more that 10% of the grade.) Their class was using traditional sequencing (HA!) of the course, and they were getting ready to take an exam on infinite series.

Student 1: "Did you study for this?"

Student 2: "Nah, you really can't study for this. All the problems are different. There isn't any way to tell how to do them."