X-Week

X-Week... a time of fear and a time desperation. X-week occurs every 6 weeks at the Academy, they break our semester into thirds, giving us grades after each 6 week term. X-week is typically jammed packed with tests, quizzes, papers, and reading. For some reason teachers wait until X-week to schedule everything. However, mids still manage to find a way to carry out our jokes and games during x-week with a creative contest of Us vs. Them. Now, USNA in any competition has always said Go Navy, Beat (fill-in the blank). So this carries over to even exams, Go navy beat exams. In the hall we took it even further by posting scoreboards on our doors. You can post them in two ways, a single scoreboard per room or one for each roommate. Now they aren't just your score and exams score... no no no. We find two mortal enemy's, one good and one bad... usually unrelated but when put together are hilarious or are part of an inside joke funny to that room. Label Us (the good guy) vs Them (the mortal enemy)... To keep score of this duel is simple. After the test if you think you passed, you win... if you think you got completely owned, dominated, etc they won.

This is an example from my youngster year 2nd semester... 3 engineers fighting the good fight against dynamics... There is a good chance that they won that semester... the funny thing is, you'd be surprised how often they do win... but its okay cause we're America's best and brightest :)





Another good tradition at the academy is tossing penny's into Tecumsah's (he's the god of 2.0... aka 2.0 gpa) quiver for good luck. This picture is from my plebe year, the night before the dreaded Chemistry II final. I think we threw at least a dollar's worth of penny's each it seemed like.