Quantum Superposition of Exams

or “How are your exams related to Schrödinger’s Cat”

Right, so as weird as it may sound, I have found some similarities between the two and I want to tell you how I got this particular idea, and why you shouldn’t just close this page right away.

Quantum Superposition

I am no scientist, because, let’s be honest, as much as I may want psychology to be a proper science it is never going to take a spot on the shelf among those fancy sciences like Physics or Chemistry with all their empirical methods and falsifiability. Therefore, I am not going to try and explain quantum mechanics to you, but what I am going to do is give you a few general ideas as to what ‘superposition’ is and how it works from my perspective. If you look up “Quantum Superposition” on wikipedia… Oh yeah don’t look for “superposition” alone because it gives you a bunch of results among which you can find an EP which goes by the same name and was released by Kling Klang (who, as I found out later, are an experimental/progressive rock band from Liverpool) in 2002. Back to the topic, if you actually were to look up “Quantum Superposition” on Wiki, this is what you’d get.

“Quantum superposition is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics that holds that a physical system—such as an electron—exists partly in all its particular, theoretically possible states (or, configuration of its properties) simultaneously;”

Confused yet? But wait, there’s more! For those of you who didn’t get the quote above… well, if I were you I’d be a bit worried about my reading skills, but if you are dying to know what all those symbols next to the green line are (they are letters by the way), let me put it this way. The theory of quantum superposition suggests that a particle exists in all its states simultaniously. What Schrödinger did, is he thought up an experiment, which would apply the principles of quantum mechanics to real life.

Schrödinger’s Cat

I am not going to explain the whole thing, because this introduction is way too long already and if you want a proper explanation just go watch this YouTube video (or use Wiki). It will only take you a couple of minutes. The general idea is that we put a cat in a box. We seal the box. Then, a chain of events (different in different interpretations of the experiment) leads to two outcomes when the box is opened. Either the cat is found alive or the cat is found dead, but not both. The trick is that while the box is sealed, the cat is effectively both dead and alive, i.e. in a state of superposition and we do not have a way of knowing which one is it until we open the box. But it gets better.

My interpretation

I have been thinking (don’t ask me why I think about exams and their relation to quantum mechanics) and came up with this weird idea, so just hear me out. Let’s say you are taking an exam in… History. The matter is so subjective and the inter-rater reliability of the exam paper is so low that 10 different examiners will probably give you 10 different amounts of marks for your essay or whatnot. Which leads me onto my next point. When you sit your exam and submitt your paper you no one in the world knows what grade did you get for the exam, which is much like the cat being put in the box. Once it is inside the box (once you finish writing and give the paper to the invigilator), there is no way of knowing if it is dead or alive (if you passed or not). You paper then just sits there, waiting to be scanned and sent to the examiner. All of that time, up until the very moment that you open you e-mail containing your exam results (someone opens the box), your paper effectively is in superposition because in theory you can get a range of like 10 or 15 different amounts of marks (say, anything from 35% to 45% if you are terrible at history like I am) for it and there is no way to check what you got until you yourself check the grades on a set day at a set time. As I explained earlier the Theory of Quantum Superposition suggests that a particle exists in all its states simultaneously, and if I were to take an extreme example (and I can do that because this is just a theory and people are going to tear it apart anyway, so why bother?) there would be an examiner, who would give 0 marks for a quesiton where another one would give 15 marks for the very same question. So in theory, the given question and thus the whole paper is in all its possible states ranging from 0% to 100% simultaneously and we only get to see which of the 101 possibilities actually works out when we get the result, i.e. until then, your pages of writing are in superposition.