14 Important Life Lessons You Only Learn By Accident

3. Believing An Open-Book Test Will Be Easy

Teachers are tricky creatures, always looking for ways to make us learn without us even realising it. One of their favorite methods for putting a fast one on us is announcing the test is "open-book." Our hearts are raised by this news because we instantly assume one, crucial thing: we don't have to study. Why would we? The notes will be right in front of us! But teachers aren't fools. They deliberately make the test precisely 10 times harder in order for it be impossible to pass without studying, anyway. We scour the book looking for hidden answers to questions that are impossible to find, and we run out of time. Thus, the lesson is that nothing is free. If someone is offering you something that seems free - like a passing grade on a test without really studying - then they probably have something far more dastardly in mind.