After receiving complaints about their unrealistic testing policies, the Department of Chemistry responded by dropping the portion of their weekly exams that forced students to juggle beakers brimming with corrosive acid on camera while simultaneously reciting all 118 elements of the periodic table in order of their electronegativities.

“We understand the inequities and difficulties of a remote education,” explained department chair Beven Stoxer. “Thus, we will now be administering the weekly juggle-and-periodic-table assessment as two separate, timed tests. As a display of compassion, students will no longer be required to complete the tasks simultaneously. Also, exams will now be 89 percent and not 90 percent of your final grade.”

Stoxer’s decision met resistance from his colleagues in the department, who claim that the juggle-and-periodic-table test is a critical assessment of chemical knowledge, especially for those wanting to enter medical fields. Meanwhile, students celebrated the change but remain unsatisfied with many of the department’s other policies.

“Yeah, I’m obviously happy, but I still need to prepare for the portion of the exam where you taste 10 chemicals blindfolded and try to guess each carbon’s hybridization,” said pre-medicine student Jane McLane ’23. “Also, um, how about the 20-minute quizzes that the University specifically discouraged?”

At press time, the department was seen preparing vials of nitric oxide (NO) to send to students petitioning for Satisfactory/No Credit grading basis.

Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only.

Contact Patrick Monreal at pmonreal ‘at’ stanford.edu.