the students in my class (well, the class i'm TAing) have an exam tomorrow. naturally, they're all freaking out about the test, and emailing me long lists of questions. some are legitimately good questions, asking either to clarify some information from lecture, or to expand on some topic or other.

then there's a whole class of questions which annoy me. they all follow the pattern, "for topic X, do we have to know Y?" examples include: "in class we've covered a lot of different experiments. do we have to know the names of the experimenters of every study?" and "do we have to know the principal structures of the brain?" and "do we have to know the different kinds of neuroimaging?" i hate questions like this, which basically amount to asking what's on the test. so, regardless of the question, the answer is always yes. yes, you have to know that. yes, that will be on the test. even if i know that that particular topic is *not* on the test, or that they *don't* have to know it because we'll give them that information (as in the names of the experimenters), the answer is always yes.

is it wrong for me to get a little bit of pleasure when i get to answer yes about a particularly obscure/unimportant topic?