You must correctly answer three or more questions [of ten] to qualify.
"Okie-dokie, ladygals! Your physical education final exam consists of me not making any misinterpreted remarks about the length of your shorts...and you doing a single push-up!"
— Gym Coach, Teen Girl Squad, Issue 14
A teacher gives an exam with so few questions and/or such simple questions that even the dumbest student could answer them all correctly without trying. Maybe they want a break from grading piles and piles of papers, they're burned out from dealing with troublemakers every single day, or they think their students deserve a break. Or they're looking for an excuse to pass a really dumb student who they want out of their hair. A subversion of this trope is when the test seems ridiculously simple at first, but is in fact intended to trick students who didn't read it carefully enough.
This kind of exam is probably being given by an Apathetic Teacher or Extreme Doormat teacher. An odd or incompetent teacher might do this as well.
Examples:
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- A commercial for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese featured a teacher who stood before a group of very stoic looking students and told them that today's exam would feature a single question. She pulls the screen of the projector and reveals a blackboard with the equation "1+1= " on it before saying "Good luck." This causes one of the students to rejoice. The narrator chimes in and says that preparing their product is still easier than answering the question.
Anime & Manga
- Assassination Classroom: Inverted in Episode 5, where both classes 3-E and 3-A take exams in all the subjects. As class 3-E is treated like outcasts and isolated from the school's main building, the teachers of the main building up the difficulty of their tests by broadening their scope to cover all the subjects, which class 3-E's teacher Karasuma points out is unfair.
- Doki Doki School Hours: When her whole class passes their exams with flying colors, the principal scolds Mika Sensei for making her tests far too easy.
- Food Wars!: During the Central arc, for the promotion exams, Second Seat Rindo Koboyashi only requires Takumi and Megumi to make a decent dish that was enough to satisfy her tastebuds to pass. As all three are attending an academy where everyone is to some level a Supreme Chef, this was extremely easy for both characters. Arc Villain Azami is even annoyed when he gets word of this (Rindo was supposed to face both in a Cooking Duel to make sure neither of them would pass the exams) and bans her from any further proctoring as a result.
Comic Books
- Tytus, Romek i A'tomek: In Volume XIII, Tytus manages to get a driver's license with the examiners asking only one question — whether he has a free and non-forced will to drive a car. It's implied this is one of the reasons why the amount of drivers on the island is astronomical.
Comic Strips
- One Sunday strip of FoxTrot has Paige taking a math final exam that is very easy to solve. Unfortunately, it was All Just a Dream.
Fan Works
- Implacable: To legally hinder the PRT from making her participate in the Wards program, Taylor manages to fail the exam required for Wards to be certified for patrols. The exam is open-book and considered by everyone to be a mere formality — Vista passed without difficulty on her first try at age eleven — but technically it's still a requirement, so Taylor exploits it.
Films — Live-Action
- In Idiocracy, Joe Bowers has been stuck in suspended animation for 500 years while society became progressively dumber. After getting arrested and convicted in a kangaroo court, he is given an IQ test to determine a suitable prison job, which is shown to be ridiculously easy by Joe's standards and eventually reveals him to be the smartest man in the world.
Computer: "If you have one bucket that holds two gallons, and another bucket that holds five gallons, how many buckets do you have?"Joe: "...Two?"
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Zig-Zagged. When the remaining knights have to answer three questions to cross the Bridge of Death:
- Lancelot is only asked for his name, his quest, and his favorite color, getting an easy pass.
- Promptly subverted when Robin goes next, and he is asked for his name, his quest.... and the capital of Assyria. He cannot answer and is thrown to his death.
- Double subverted when Galahad goes up and he gets the favorite color question again. Subverted again when he still manages to get this wrong, and is thrown to his death.
- Inverted when King Arthur is asked for the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow, and Arthur turns the question back on the Bridgekeeper: "African or European swallow?" The Bridgekeeper doesn't know, and is thrown to his death.
Literature
- One of the illustrations in Sean Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens shows a couple of hung-over football players taking a college entrance exam with questions like "name five kings of England named George," and "what is your favorite color" as commentary on how colleges will bend the rules for money-making athletes.
- Discworld: In Moving Pictures, Victor Tugelbend, to remain a student in Unseen University indefinitely (which he wants to do to continue getting money from his dead uncle's estate), has been repeatedly almost but not quite passing his final exam. The faculty get tired of this and try to give him a special final exam with one question: "What is your name?". It backfires when due to various other circumstances, another student gets handed his test paper.
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban: For the third years' Care of Magical Creatures final exam, Hagrid gives everyone a flobberworm and tells them to keep it alive for one hour in order to pass the test. A flobberworm is a boring and mostly useless magical creature that does best if left to its own devices. Unlike most examples of this trope, Hagrid isn't trying to reward the students; rather, he's so anxious and depressed about the thought of his beloved hippogriff Buckbeak being executed that he isn't able to produce a proper exam.
- The Secret History: The Invariant Subspaces course at Hampden College has had an exam that consists of the same one yes-or-no question for as long as anyone can remember. The question is three pages long, but the answer is always 'Yes'.
- TSUKIMICHI -Moonlit Fantasy-: Makoto is told that the Merchant Guild test is extremely hard and barely anyone passes on their first try. He finishes in seconds and scores an unprecedented perfect score. Since the Goddess of the world prioritizes physical beauty above all else, the education level is terrible. Makoto compares the questions to grade school math problems.
Live-Action TV
- One skit by a teen comedy troupe has a school class being taught during the Stone Age. The teacher begins with "Ug invented the wheel. The wheel was invented by Ug." After questioning some students, the teacher announces Final Exam, in which the sole question is: "What did Ug invent?" Back in those days, there just wasn't that much to learn.
- In the Community season one penultimate episode, "English as a Second Language", Annie rats out Señor Chang from their Spanish class to the dean for not being qualified to teach. An incompetent Sadist Teacher who knows nothing about the subject he was supposed to teach and taught the study group next to nothing of value, he is fired just before the final and replaced by a native Spanish-speaking professor who intends to give the class an exam so hard that none will pass. Having learned nothing from Chang and disrupted in their attempts to study by group infighting, they expect to fail the test... only to find it shockingly easy and all of them pass. As revealed at the end, the new teacher is sleeping with Pierce and gave an especially easy test as a favor to him.
- The Good Place: In "The Burrito", the four humans appeal to Gen, the omniscient Judge, to be allowed into the Good Place, insisting they've become better people in the afterlife. Gen arranges tests tailored to each person's Fatal Flaw, three of which would be trivially easy to pass if they really had grown as much as they claimed note :
- To test Jason's immaturity and impulsiveness, Gen sets up a game of Madden NFL against his beloved Jacksonville Jaguars. He would pass if he realized he doesn't have to play the game at all, or if he just asked Gen for clarification—but Jason fails by jumping into the game before she's finished explaining.
- To test Tahani's obsession with her own reputation and issues with her parents, who always openly favored her sister Kamilah, she's placed in a hallway lined with doors. Behind each door is someone she knew in life sharing their true opinion of her. To pass, she just has to walk to the end of the hallway without opening any of the doors. Tahani almost makes it, but when the last door leads to her parents, she can't resist opening that door and giving them a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
- To test Chidi's indecisiveness, he's given a choice between two hats, a black one and a grey one. There is no trick. Either hat is an acceptable answer. Chidi fails the test by taking 82 minutes to decide.
- Played for laughs in Saturday Night Live's "Celebrity Jeopardy!" sketches, where the celebrities' ineptitude cause the categories and clues to become increasingly childish and easy, with such examples as "Animal Sounds" ("This is the sound a doggy makes."note ), "How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up?", "Words That Rhyme with 'Dog'", and "Batman or Robin". Even when the category all but gives it away, the celebrities are never able to provide the correct responses; for instance, "Colors That End In 'urple'" contained the blatantly easy clue "This color ends in 'urple'." Cue Hillary Swank (Jimmy Fallon) guessing "light urple". "Final Jeopardy!" always consists of Alex Trebek (Will Ferrell), sick of the celebrities, telling them to write down something simple, only to see them bungle that, too.
Trebek: Okay, let's just move on to Final Jeopardy. And the category is... you know what? I tell you what, just write a number. Any number, any number and you win.
Video Games
- Kingdom of Loathing: To get access to the player chat, the "Ghost of the English Language" gives the players "challenges" to prove their literacy. The first is copying a sentence down with correct capitalization and punctuation, the second is to use the word "there/their/they're" and "your/you're" right, and the third is to answer the question "What color was George Washington's favorite black horse?"
Web Animation
- Teen Girl Squad: In Issue 14, the girls' gym coach tells them to do a single push-up for their final exam. When they say, "NO!!" he gives them all A's.
Web Video
- Ultra Fast Pony: In "Remember the Name", Rainbow Dash's final exam to get into the Occasionally Effective Flight Team has been reduced to a single question, "due to budget cuts". There are extra pages for her to work out the answer, and she can take as much time as she needs, or even leave the exam room to ask her friends for help. That single question: "What is your name?" Rainbow Dash still struggles to answer the question for the entire episode, even as the proctor calls her by name multiple times during the exam. When Rainbow finally turns in the exam, her answer is "The Battle of Waterloo 1973", and the proctor still lets her pass.
Western Animation
- Action League NOW!: In "The Naked and the Dumb", the Action League's test to renew their action hero licenses is the First Grade Equivalency Test, given to them by Bill the Lab Guy. Most of the members of the Action League pass the test, but the only one who doesn't is The Flesh, who marked his answers in the shape of a kitten. The only way The Flesh can stay in the league is to retake the test and pass, and since The Flesh is the only member with Super-Strength, the rest of the League take turns tutoring him, suffering a series of Amusing Injuries in the process. When The Flesh retakes the test, he gets every answer right, and reveals the secret to his success; this time, he marked his answers in the shape of a dog.
- Dexter's Laboratory:
- The episode "The Big Cheese" has Dexter preparing for a French test by wearing a device and placing a French-language record inside it while he sleeps, allowing him to memorize the French phrases. However, it gets stuck on the phrase "omelette du fromage" (which means "cheese omelette"), and the next day, it's the only thing he can say. When he goes to school, his French teacher tells the class the exam is one question, asking "How do you say 'cheese omelette' in French?"
- The episode "Dream Machine" shows Dexter having a nightmare where, while Dee Dee is positively acing a test that includes questions like "What is the purpose of meaning?" (which she solves using a mess of complicated-looking equations that have Albert Einstein looking on in awe), he's struggling with a test whose sole question is "2+2=___".
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998): Of the three Powerpuff Girls, Bubbles is the sweet, adorable one who is sometimes (wrongly) treated as a less capable fighter than her more aggressive sisters. At the beginning of "Bubblevicious", when she enters the Professor's fighting simulator, he turns it down to level 2 and pits her against a goofy 1950s-style toy robot smaller than her that says, "Boo! I'm gonna get you! Boo! I'm gonna get you! Boo!" She protests that she's just as capable of fighting monsters as Blossom and Buttercup, but the robot zaps her when she isn't looking, causing the Professor to tell her she's not ready for the higher levels yet.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "No Free Rides", after yet another failed driving test, Mrs. Puff attempts to get rid of SpongeBob with an impossible-to-fail extra credit assignment: writing one ten-word sentence about what he learned in boating school, even giving him most of the words. Somehow, SpongeBob finds a way to bungle that.
Real Life
- In this
Not Always Learning story, the submitter's professor gives a pop quiz worth 20 points (a lot in that class), with the hardest questions being "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" and "How long does it take to cook a 3-minute-egg?" It's actually for the purpose of rewarding the students who bothered to show up, as more than 30 students had cut class that day.
- One trick test sometimes given out in American high schools combines this trope with Exact Words. The first question states "Read all questions before beginning to answer," with the following questions containing instructions ranging from the simple ("Write your name on top of the paper") to the embarrassing ("Stand up and sing the National Anthem as loud as you can"). The last question reads "Now that you have read all the questions as stated in Question 1, put your pen down and do not answer any more questions"—students who actually read the exam and didn't immediately begin answering the other questions are the only ones who pass (or, at least, save themselves from being humiliated). This exam is especially popular in science classes, as it emphasizes the importance of following directions and having a strict plan in place before diving into experiments.
- "NO!"
"Great work! You all get A's!"
