For years I had a recurring nightmare. Instead of being a professor serving on a qualifying exam or PhD thesis defense committee to grill a stressed-out graduate student, I was the student.
As I stood at the blackboard, the committee bombarded me with questions. But instead of mathematics questions, they asked:
"How old are you?"
"When did you get your undergraduate degree?"
"Where did you get your undergraduate degree?"
Once they satisfied themselves that I had gotten my degree at a sufficiently precocious age and from a sufficiently prestigious institution, they started in on more personal questions. I kept trying to bring them back to the mathematics topics I was supposed to be tested on, but they kept interrupting me with irrelevant questions. Every so often the committee would discuss how they felt about my answers.
The exam (and nightmare) ended with no math questions being asked.
While I never saw a real exam like that, the nightmare probably came from how the mathematical community evaluates people, and the contrast with what I had seen at IBM.
I spent the academic year 1988-89 on a fellowship at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights. One day, Don Coppersmith showed me the CV of an applicant for the fellowship, and asked for my opinion of it.
The first thing I did was calculate the candidate's age based on the birthdate on the CV. I remarked approvingly on how young the candidate was when he got his PhD.
Don snatched the CV out of my hand, and told me that they're not allowed to take age into account. He said it was a mistake that we saw the birthdate---HR should have removed it.
Whenever anyone asks me about my year at IBM, I say "The main difference I saw between IBM and academia was that at IBM, they knew the law and obeyed it."