University exams are never anyone’s idea of a rollicking time, particularly when your professor rambles on besotted for 23 hours, denies you sustenance and bathroom breaks, and covers topics not on the syllabus, such as her wardrobe and outside business interests. And according to students at Russia’s Kazan Federal University, this is exactly what precipitated on June 26, when an oral nuclear physics examination began at 10:00 AM and ended at 9:00 AM the following day. In an interview with the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, one of the pupils noted, “Towards the end, everyone was just sitting there, totally exhausted […] The lecturer would go into another room, drink, come back and start telling us about her business.” Oral exams are not uncommon in Russia, and even the instructor admitted that this one in particular ran long. But marathon examiner Landysh Zaripova responded to these allegations with a swipe at her fifteen students’ academic aptitude, saying “Do you think I am an idiot? I was sober. The students just decided to get revenge on me because they couldn’t pass the exam.
