[banish-m4]

How else would I have shrunk 12 pages of high-school physics notes to fit on the allowed 3x5" (76x127mm) index card with 0.1 pt font printed in raster mode at 600 dpi on an HP LaserJet 4? WP 5.2 for DOS. IIRC, Word for Windows at the time was inflexible in granularity of TrueType font sizes.

[lallysingh]

.1 pt? Did they allow a magnifying glass for the test?

[banish-m4]

No, but I had really good vision then and could see it by squinting and using the pinhole camera trick. In the end, the exhaustive preparation made the difference. It might as well have been open book because it was a damn hard test that relied on first principles and problem-solving rather than anything that was memorizable. It was relatively harder than the SAT-I but wasn't outdone by either an abstract mathematics or modern physics for physicists & engineers finals in college. I now wonder about the utility of academic hazing rituals, if it wasn't just a formulaic cash-grab and elitism demand rather than a meaningful attempt at knowledge or process indoctrination.