Final exams are looming on the UW-Madison campus. A time of stress, cramming and little sleep.
It’s tough on students. But it’s even tougher on their grandmothers.
Last spring, students at the School of Human Ecology could walk into their school’s building on Linden Drive and see in the entry an exhibit detailing just how perilous exam time is for the grandmothers of college students.
“I don’t remember what inspired me,” Dave Riley, the man responsible for the exhibit, was saying this week.
Riley is a professor in the school. Years earlier he had read an article originally published in the Connecticut Review titled, “The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall of American Society.”
The crux of the article can be summed up in one sentence near the top: “A student’s grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.”