American Adventure: My Uncle is Don Quixote

In the following days, snow began to fall intermittently in New Haven.

Li Wei’s final exam week, amidst the cold wind and snow, was like a precision bulldozer, crushing any exam that dared to stand in his way.

Whether it was "Institutional Investing and the Yale Model" or "Financial Market Ethics and Systemic Risk," Li Wei could fill his answer sheets with formulas and logical chains well within the allotted time before turning them in early and leaving.

Given the speed of Yale University’s registrar system, official grades for closed-book final exams like these wouldn’t be entered into the system and released until mid-Christmas break, or even January.

But Li Wei knew, through one way or another, that he had definitely scored straight A’s or A+’s on all the exams he had taken so far.

As for why, it was because he discovered that apparently every professor in the school knew about the bet he had with the Dean of the School of Management—

"If Li Wei fails to get straight A’s in his first semester, he must voluntarily withdraw and stop using the NFL as an excuse to desecrate Yale’s academic dignity. But if he succeeds, the Dean will owe him a huge favor."

The bet must have spread throughout the entire school in private. There was no other way to explain why this group of tenured professors—who were usually too lazy to even proctor their own exams and typically just sent a PhD student TA to hand out the papers—would all show up in the exam hall themselves.

And during the exams, they would all pace silently like ghosts to a spot just behind and to the side of Li Wei, intensely scrutinizing his every move as he answered the questions.

Li Wei wasn’t bothered at all, but it put the students sitting around him under immense pressure.

Every time they watched Li Wei finish his test with the speed of a human computer, all the professors would murmur their praises, openly or under their breath, and then tell him to keep it up and prepare well for the next one.

Soon, the final exam week drew to a close.

Li Wei faced his last final exam: "Financial Derivatives and Empirical Pricing," a course at Yale University nicknamed the "Undergraduate Killer" because over half the undergrads who took it would fail.

A failure rate of over 50%, and a forced curve where 90% of those who passed could only get a B. The course demanded extremely strong quantitative analysis skills. The exam was filled with stochastic calculus, Itô’s lemma, and incredibly complex Monte Carlo simulations.

A normal student wouldn’t even be able to finish half the questions in the three-hour time limit.

Friday morning. A blizzard.

Li Wei brushed the snowflakes off the shoulders of his overcoat and pushed open the doors to the large lecture hall on the third floor of the School of Management.

In stark contrast to the pale-faced elites frantically flipping through their notes for a last-ditch effort, he simply sat down in his seat with nothing but three rollerball pens in his pocket.

At 9 a.m., the exam began on time.

The elites, who had been whispering and frantically comparing answers, fell silent in an instant.

As they saw who walked in, a collective gasp echoed through the entire classroom.

The person who entered wasn’t the usual PhD student TA in charge of handing out the exams, but the Dean of the School of Management himself.

The academic authority swept his sharp gaze across the room, his eyes lingering on Li Wei for a few seconds.

"All items not related to the exam, place them at the front of the classroom. We will now distribute the papers."

The exam papers were passed out. It was a thick stack, a good dozen pages long.

Just as all the students took a deep breath, preparing to battle the dense wall of stochastic calculus formulas...

...something happened that made their stress levels skyrocket. The Dean didn’t stand at the lectern like a normal proctor. Instead, he walked straight to the back of the room and stood just behind and to the side of Li Wei.

Li Wei, of course, noticed the gaze on his back, but he couldn’t care less.

His 5.0 Spirit attribute was like having a small computer in his brain, equipped with both storage and processing capabilities.

Popping the cap off his pen, Li Wei skipped the thinking and calculation steps entirely.

SCRIBBLE SCRIBBLE SCRIBBLE—

The Dean’s expression changed. Dropping all pretense, he walked right up to Li Wei’s side to watch him work.

’He got A’s in all the other courses. This class is the last line of defense.’

’Fack!’

Li Wei was completely unaffected by the Dean standing beside him and scrutinizing his paper, but the male student in the next seat, half an aisle away, was about to break.

This student had pulled three all-nighters to prepare for this one course.

The only thing was, what he had "prepared" were cheat sheets.

Right now, the inside of his thigh and the lining of his cuffs were covered in densely packed derivation formulas.

His original plan had been perfect: the moment the TA turned their back, he would use his well-rehearsed sleight of hand and feints to copy a few key formulas. It might not get him the final answer, but it would be close enough. At the very least, it would show the professor he had actually studied, hopefully letting him scrape by with a C and avoid failing.

But he never in a million years expected that the proctor today would be the Dean himself!

What made him despair even more was that the Dean just had to be standing right next to him!

He could even see the fine hairs on the back of the Dean’s hands, which were clasped behind his back. He had no doubt that if he dared to so much as move his hand toward his cuff, he’d be caught instantly and face the miserable fate of expulsion.

The air conditioning in the classroom was running warm, but he felt a chill run through his body.

Cheating was impossible now. He could only stare at the exam questions with trembling hands, trying to rely on his own abilities to decipher them.

...

’Decipher my ass!’