I just completed a textbook company's questionnaire (supposedly, they will send me a $5 Amazon gift certificate for doing it - I'm cheap that way). I'm kind of irritated at them, even though I'm sure it was written by some brand-spanking-new-advertising-person, but one of their questions really grated on me. It was about "how do you prepare your exams?"

Now, you must understand: I disdain test-prep software. I think it's too easy to be hacked into or for bootleg copies of it to make its way out into the community. And also, the test banks I've looked at have been either woefully stupid or else totally unrelated to what I actually covered in class. So I write my own damn tests, thank you very much.

Well, the question was, as I said, "How do you prepare your exams?" The choices were "test bank A" "other publisher's test bank" "our lovely, brand-spanking-new test bank (which we will doubtless phone you up about to try to sell to you)" or "a stack of old exams, scissors, and the help of the departmental secretary."

Um, hello? That's really not a very kind way to put it - suggesting that if we don't use Brand Spanky Sparkly Test Bank we're some kind of dinosaurian being that teaches from crumbling legal pads we last wrote on 20 years ago (Okay, maybe I'm overreacting, but that's the vibe I got).

In short: if we don't use your test bank, it's not necessarily US, it might be YOU (to turn around the only break-up line I've ever used or had to use).

there was a choice labeled "other" so I put in there something not unlike "my intelligence and experience" coupled with a comment that I didn't appreciate the crack about "scissors, a stack of old exams..." because it implied that anyone who wrote their own exams any more was, like, so monumentally inefficient.

Urgh. I need to go home. Getting cranky.