01_ It was at the end of the first year of the engineering course "at Fundão," in 1966. There were 4 classes of about 100 students each, two in the morning (A and B) and two in the afternoon (C and D). The speaker here was from class A.
02_ The calculus professor for class A was a certain Tourinho, an engineer from the Federal Railroad Network who, claiming he needed to attend a conference abroad on locomotives, was absent and left the final exams to the professor for classes B, C, and D, Prof. Radival, also known as Admiral Radival, perhaps because he was indeed an Admiral or maybe because he also taught at the Naval School. It’s worth noting that there was an assistant professor, Raymundo de Oliveira, rumored to have been expelled from ITA for being a communist. Years later, Raymundo became President of CEDAE and the Engineering Club, an excellent colleague and friend.
03_ Calculus was considered a difficult, tough course that failed many students. The adopted textbook was "Calculus I, by Thomas," but some preferred to study using Granville. Each book was about the size of a brick, hence the nickname.
04_ Radival didn’t hesitate and scheduled the final exam for around 250 students (the rest had passed directly) in the exam rooms of block A at Fundão, around the end of November. All classes together, the two in the morning and the two in the afternoon.
05_ The students thought it would be easy to "do well"; no one can properly control around 250 students during an exam. Everyone was feeling confident, after all, we had passed one of the most competitive entrance exams in the country and were no longer considered freshmen. We were already pretty cocky.
06_ So, not wanting to miss the opportunity, as was customary, mutual help "offices" were organized, calling on classmates who had already passed and older colleagues to be there on exam day to provide support.
07_ We all sat down, like in all other exams, each student at a desk, arranged neatly in about 5 columns (one by the big window and another against the opposite wall where the doors were), and about 10 rows, with wide aisles between the 5 longitudinal rows and a good distance between desks, roughly 50 desks per room. To accommodate 250 students, 5 rooms were needed.
08_ One supervising professor for two rooms. We couldn’t believe it. The exams arrived neatly packaged, organized, and numbered, consisting of one mimeographed page front and back with 10 questions—actually 10 polynomial equations—to be derived or integrated, with the answers provided in six multiple-choice options for each question.
09_ The attendance sheets circulated orderly, numbered and signed. Everything went normally, within the law and order.
10_ It was an exemplary “general graduation,” very well planned. To save time, 10 classmates who sat near the windows were tasked with copying one of the ten questions onto little pieces of paper and throwing them out the windows. Classmates who had already passed and older students collected them downstairs, solved the questions, and hung the solutions on fishing lines previously set up to be retrieved upon a coded whistle when a classmate arrived at the door pretending to be from the Student Council to make an invitation or ask the professor to make an announcement. There were also discreet holes drilled in the walls below the desks to pass rolled-up papers through with those strings. Each office had its preferences. High technology, great emotions, initiative, creativity, learning to deal with difficulties and reality, overcoming obstacles, teamwork, etc., etc. Some even had ideological justifications; after all, the guy was a military, a gorilla imposing dictatorship (from the navy would it be a shark?), although Raymundo’s presence justified the opposite, but never mind.
11_ Once the solutions returned on little papers: question 1 answer “c,” question 2 answer “a,” question 3 answer “f” (f was always none of the above), and so on, they were quickly distributed, democratically in the room, with all the techniques and state-of-the-art methods to deceive the supervising professors.
12_ Some of the equations were quite simple to solve; I even did a few, but since what is illegal, what is prohibited, and what is tempting has an enormous attraction, we ended up cheating even without needing to, as a challenge to overcome. The exam went normally with all our technologies functioning as planned, discreetly and efficiently.
13_ We all went home to celebrate the success of the endeavor. The vacation would be total freedom, each one feeling superior to the others.
14_ Five days later, the results came out: of the 250 exams, 200 received a zero! Zero!
15_ It couldn’t be; this Radival was absurd, who did he think he was?
16_ We all requested a review of the exam. It was scheduled for a Monday at 8 am. When I arrived, there was already a line of about 30 classmates in the corridor of the 3rd floor of block A, room 306, where the calculus office was and where the reviews would take place.
17_ I got in line, and it wasn’t 5 minutes before the first classmate came out of the review room. It was Gilson, a repeat student in that course (a year older), whom I knew well because he lived near me in Botafogo and also frequented the Guanabara Rowing Club. Gilson saw me and said for everyone to hear: “Friend, let’s go home and study for the second chance. No one will be able to get their grade reviewed.”
_ Why? What happened?
_ What happened is that Radival was smarter than all of us combined and screwed us over.
He gave two slightly different exams: the even and odd ones from the package distributed. Of the 10 questions, 5 were the same, but 5 were not; for example, in the second term of equation two, one was sin−2\sin^{-2}sin−2 in the even exams, and in the odd ones it was cos−2\cos^{-2}cos−2. Nobody paid attention, so there’s a correct answer from the odd exam on the even exam and vice versa. It’s a shame to go discuss this. Better to just leave.
18_ I went home to study; we took the exam in February, those who studied passed, and there was no persecution, as some had claimed.
19_ And we learned many things, the main one being that there’s always someone smarter than others, especially among those who think they’re smart.
20_ This Professor Radival was one of the best teachers I had: without ever having had a single class with him, he taught me one of the great lessons of my life.
Great Radival. My respect and gratitude! This chronicle is a tribute I make to you.
P.S.: I consulted some colleagues about the event, but Eduardo Massa and Josemauri Freire claimed they always passed directly in all subjects and don’t remember. Zé Soares de Mattos also claims he passed but remembers the case. Tim Maia set a precedent... I’m beginning to think I only keep in touch with the “rare birds” who passed, perhaps because they cheated on the monthly exams.
Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer and chronicler
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