Back during my sophomore year of college, all of us engineering majors had to take a class called "E-54 Experimental Engineering." In reality, it was some sort of organized hazing of engineering students by the department. Almost.

Essentially, the class was broken into three parts: a lecture three times per week, a lab that started on an evening and continued the following afternoon, and independent work in metal and wood shops. Yes, shops.

The labs started at about 3PM and went until about 6PM for the afternoon session, and started at about 6PM and went until about 9PM for the evening session. My friend Dave was in the same group as me, the next day, such that I was in group 1, Monday, he was in group 1, Tuesday. (Yes, this is all important to the story).

Now, I never really new Dave, since he didn't live in my dorm or anything, and I was just a sophomore, and up until this second semester (when all of this takes place, in spring, 1991 as a matter of fact) we were all taking big classes, so this was one of the first classes in our major. The labs were about things we had never done in high school, such as op-amp feedback circuits, fluid dynamics, heat exchange, temperature control systems, and so on, and those lectures I mentioned were only 30 minutes (ie not enough time or info), so we all had to count on each other to get through it. Group 1, Monday (my group) was the very first group for 8 weeks to do any particular lab, which meant my group had no one but upperclassmen to talk to, and they all forgot about it (or laughed aloud at my predicament).

So this is how Dave and I began communicating, since my group was only hours ahead of his group, and we could always share notes on what was working and what extra information they had, say, after lab Monday night. The bottom line is, this is where I got to know Dave.

The shop classes, however, will form the plot of this story. It seems that amidst all of the other craziness, all engineering majors have to make a sheet metal tool tray, a lucite-handled screwdriver with a heat treated blade, and a wooden-handled, dual-faced steel-headed hammer using (typically) unfamiliar tools with only the help and guidance of students who did this all the year before (but who did not recall anything about the damn labs). We're talking metal lathes, mills, wood lathes, sheet metal breaks, punches, heat treating and quenching, all to thousandth-inch tolerance (measured by a prof who many believed was nearly 100 years old...).

Sounds fun, right? But wait, because remember that there's that silly lab to prepare for, and then there is all of the other homework (standard engineering fourth semester included electrical, chemical, systems, and experimental engineering, along with humanities, differential equations, and no sleep), so on top of everything, there were trips to the shops to try to get some time on the machines (we had plenty of computers all over the place, you see, but only 3 metal lathes, 1 wood lathe, 3 mills, 1 sheet metal break...). My roommates and I, and Dave, usually opted for odd-hour work, which helped, as did the (story-critical) spilt schedule, where half of the class made the hammer and half the screwdriver.

And now the interesting part. Given all of this pressure in the way of homework and academia in general, the time in the shops was actually sort of therapeutic. Dave, who spent more than a few hours of his spare time on this, ended up with a hammer handle that yielded a perfect score. Not a trivial accomplishment, and one that everyone could see by simply rummaging through the return box with the graded tools, each with an identifying number stamped into them.

Well, someone rummaged alright, and when Dave went to get his hammer, he found only the head (which had a small number of points deducted for imperfection) but no handle. It seems that there was something fishy going on, and the Harvey Mudd Honor code was to be tested once again.

Several weeks later, when the second turn-ins occurred for tools, Dave was called to the prof's office to check on the handles that were turned in. Dave, after having spent so many hours sanding his handle to perfection, immediately picked out the handle he believed was his. It scored 99 points out of a possible 100, for being too short. It seems that the number that Dave had stamped on the bottom of the handle, indicating it was his, had been replaced by a new number.

We would learn later that another student, Duay, had not gotten his hammer head back, and coincidentally enough, the score he received was a perfect 100. His handle was not so perfect, however. Could it have been that a dishonest, lazy student chose the best parts from the return box, removed them, and turned them in as his own? This seems to have been a perfectly viable solution, based on the circumstantial evidence on hand, but no real proof (such as evidence of the original stampings) existed, and the student who now received the grades on the allegedly-forged parts was not owning up to anything. And so, it was dropped,

But this, gentle reader, is not where the story ends. You see, there were many other classes, which means many other finals, and there was one that would prove to be most interesting. You see, on the morning, of the Chemical Engineering final, while sitting at breakfast with my fellow sophomores, we heard an interesting story about events that were about to take place. It seems that, while the test would be largely open-book, there would be a rather simple section encompassing many many unit conversion values, which were to be recalled from rote memory only. Our hammer-handle suspect was allegedly bragging (as these sorts of people so often do) that he was completely prepared by way of a hidden index card.

This was too much. So much cheating, and bragging about it! I was irate, mostly because he was about to cheat when the very tenet of the school was against it, and also because he had already gotten away with turning in a forged piece of work that my good friend Dave had labored on for far too long. I entered the lecture hall behind this foul character.

Divine Providence? Fate? Dumb Luck? Whatever it was, this force placed our villain in a seat on the end of the very back row of the hall, with an empty seat next to him. Not for long, however, as we exchanged greetings and he adjusted his baseball cap. He didn't seem overly nervous, but there was an uneasiness about him that would become all too evident within minutes.

The test began. Our task for the first section was to recall those conversion factors, without the aid of written notes, printed materials, texts, calculators, or whispers. It proved to be quite simple, since the entire test section was ordered directly from the precise notes we had taken throughout the semester. I found I was able to fill in every blank (save one, perhaps) with the greatest of ease, which afforded me an opportunity to turn my attention to what I noticed to my right.

The hat was suddenly in his lap. Nervous he was, fidgeting and fussing, playing with it while he slowly made his way down the page. An almost-masterful slight of hand maneuver placed a small index card beneath the test paper, and the hat back on his head. Almost masterful for obvious reasons. I alone had seen it. When the corner of the test sheet came up, I simply said "Don't do it."

I turned in my first section soon after that, and I immediately told the professors at the front of the room what had occurred. Stooly? Perhaps, but in this case, there was an even higher cause. They watched him carefully, but saw nothing. He had apparently escaped.

To save on BS, I'll jump to the end. The profs knew he was a cheater, and they only needed a witness of any crime to come forward. That was me. Our student-run judiciary held a trial hours after the incident and found him guilty. He was given a failing grade for Chemical Engineering, and the school, Dave, myself, and others were immediately threatened with law suits that never happened.

And so ended our sophomore year, on a most interesting note. "E-94" had some redeeming quality after all, as we all learned. Of course, there were those who disagreed with how things happened, thinking that our poor, persecuted cheat had been wronged in some way. Needless to say, there was much dissent about me on each day that followed. I laughed, and prepared a special tee-shirt to be worn second semester of our senior year, on Tuesdays or Thursdays: "I passed E-94 without cheating."