On Feb. 23, exam season was in session early at Duke University.

Across the expansive turf of Pascal Field House, hundreds of students spread out in groups to take a lengthy test. While this one wouldn’t impact their grade point average, it would have serious ramifications for their standing in the fabled Krzyzewskiville.

The first question of the 18th page brought senior biomedical engineering major Ryan Su to a stop. Question No. 68, to be exact: “Which player scored the 67th point in the game vs. Texas Tech? [4 pts]”

“I don’t know if anyone can get [that question],” Su said.

Welcome to the annual Krzyzewskiville “ordering test.” Its takers in Durham this year earned a collective median score of 43.2%. ESPN’s esteemed Tobacco Road native Ryan McGee managed 32.2%.

On the campus of one of the most prestigious universities in the country, you’ll struggle to find many exams where the questions are harder … or at least more niche.

Among the many tents that inhabit the storied grounds of Krzyzewskiville, there’s an array of categories — flex tents, white tents, blue tents and black tents. That last group, the black tenters, marks the most dedicated of the dedicated.

Black tent rules require two of 12 inhabitants to be “on duty” during the day and 10 members to be on duty during the night throughout the tenting process, with the tradeoff for the heightened commitment being the promise of premium seats in the Cameron Crazies’ famed student section in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

But how is positioning at the front of the line determined among the black tents come time for the final home game of the year, against famed rival North Carolina? There are a couple of factors in play. Tents can amass points via three categories. Attendance at specific non-men’s-basketball sporting events marks one tenet, and “spirit awards” (superlatives like best tent name or best-decorated tents) represent another opportunity.

And then there’s the ordering test.

The ordering test doesn’t have quite the pedigree of Krzyzewskiville itself, a staple of Duke basketball since the mid-to-late 1980s — it’s actually less than a decade old. But a lack of tradition doesn’t mean its role in the black tenting process is any less vital.

“We really want to reward the most passionate students with the best spots in the student section,” said co-head Line Monitor (line monitors make up the administrative framework of Krzyzewskiville) Aidan McCarthy. “So that means those that are willing to study up, know their Duke basketball history, know their team super well, we think this test is a good evaluation of that and it helps [those students] get a better spot in line.”

But creating a test that rewards those who put the most effort in means having to go above and beyond to craft an exam that can’t easily be cracked — and measures taken against cheating are no joke either.

Just four line monitors — the two co-heads and two co-vice presidents — create the exam, and they work diligently to keep questions secret until test day. Line monitors patrol the test-taking scene throughout the hourlong time limit as proctors. Come test time, tenters’ phones, Apple Watches and other forms of technology are sequestered away to the confines of a plastic bag. There’s even a contingency plan for the possibility of a Bluetooth earpiece being used.

“We ask people with long hair to maybe put it behind their ears so that we can see that they’re not using any earpieces,” McCarthy said.

The test itself, at least the 2025-26 version, spanned 80 questions across six sections — “awards and achievements,” “Coach Scheyer,” “history and general knowledge,” “the brotherhood,” “the 2025-26 season” and “miscellaneous.” Some of the questions are staples that can be found on the exam yearly — such as queries about the Blue Devils’ career leaders in a variety of statistics, the program’s National Player of the Year winners, top NBA draft picks and more.

But the element that helps the exam pass the threshold from Duke basketball pub quiz to extreme test of devotion is the way questions can get incredibly specific. For instance, question No. 15 (from the section on Coach Jon Scheyer) reads: “In the Sweet 16 episode of the Neal Begovich Big Dance Exclusive last year, what was the first quote Kon Knueppel used when impersonating Scheyer? [4 pts].”

According to the line monitors, the median score of the page on which that question was located was just 6.67%, making it the hardest page on this year’s test. Not a single tent got No. 15 correct.

“I know that a lot of the line monitors, we watched that video, so we asked a question about it,” recalled co-vice president of tenting Carlie Scheer. “And none of the tenters got it.”

Social media provides a fruitful location for potential question discovery. Line monitors are constantly keeping their eyes peeled for possible material while consuming Duke men’s basketball content online — even if the ever-changing nature of social media means some answers might not be finalized until the day of the test.

“One of our questions was about Isaiah Evans and one of his burner Instagram accounts that he has. The question was asking ‘who does he follow on that account?'” McCarthy said. “At the time, he had only followed three people. We ended up reviewing our test, making sure everything looks good before we actually send it out, and we double-check and suddenly notice that he’s only following two people.

“And we were wondering, are tenters going to know this? Are they going to know that it changed on a whim just hours before the test?”

Just because the questions can be niche doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to prepare, though. Prior tests offer a strong starting point, since certain questions and themes carry over.

“We follow a similar question format,” Scheer said. “Obviously you’re not going to be prepared for the random questions we ask, like where does Cam Boozer’s girlfriend work (the correct answer for this query, No. 74, could be found in her Instagram bio), but the [fill in the blank] tables, questions like that, you can definitely prepare for a lot of the questions on the test if you just look at previous ones.”

Su’s tent — named “Pirates of the Sarribbean,” with inhabitants set to don pirate attire in the front row of the Crazies for Saturday’s North Carolina game — had a study guide 20-odd pages long that covered all sorts of topics related to Duke’s basketball’s players and history. Members were assigned specific areas of study, tasked with attempting to retain all possible information for questions both expected and unexpected.

Adding to the drama is an element of game theory — per test rules, incorrect answers result in negative points, making guesswork a poor strategy. If a tent is going to offer up an answer, its inhabitants would be wise to have some degree of certainty they’ve got it right, lest they run the risk of losing precious points.

“There was one question on this year’s exam where it was asking which side of the court did Cam Reddish hit a game winner [in December 2019],” recalled fellow tent member Daniel Chang. “And we were like, ‘Oh, I feel like we know this one, we saw the videos and stuff,’ but because we were not sure, exactly, we ended up not guessing that question.”

Tent captain Raul Ng Tang, a senior electrical and computer engineering major, said studying for the ordering test presented a unique challenge compared with his traditional academic workload, but a more entertaining process as well.

“It’s harder in the sense [that] it is more random, but I definitely enjoy it way more than studying for my normal classes.”

So what constitutes a good score on a test that contains questions like “Duke broke a Guinness World Record last week for the largest game of knockout. Who sponsored the event? How many people participated? Who held the previous record? What was the previous record? [4 pts total, 1 pt per question]” and deducts points for incorrect answers?

The high score on this year’s test was 79.1%. Pirates of the Sarribbean managed a 72% mark, good for the second-highest score.

Interestingly, the line monitors’ data indicates a pair of diverging trends in the recent history of test taking. Across the past three years, the highest percent score on the test has increased each year (77.13% in 2023-24, 78.45% in 2024-25 and 79.1% in 2025-26), while the median score has progressively decreased (58.01% in 23-24, 51.99% in 24-25 and 43.17% in 25-26).

“There’s some tents that have clearly really locked in before this, studied what they need to know and know a lot,” said co-head Line Monitor Claire Raney “There’s also a bunch of tents that just don’t really care to study and are just happy to get into the game at any point in the line, so you see some lower scores there. And then I think there’s a good amount of tents that just study what they know will be on it and then kind of just hope for the best on the other sections.”

By now you might be wondering why we mentioned Ryan McGee in the introduction. Undeterred by previously stated challenges of the ordering test, our resident North Carolina native agreed to put himself through the gauntlet. His answers are in bold here, although you’ll have to determine which were correct yourself, as the test-makers wanted to keep the answer key secret.

Armed with only one local media member’s knowledge of Duke history and current events, McGee got after the 20-page Google Doc while flying from Bristol, Connecticut, back to the Tar Heel State one night. In the interest of establishing some parity, we waived the traditional rule of incorrect answers resulting in points being docked.

McGee received a … 32.2%. Yes, that’s well below the median score of this year’s crop of black tenters. But for a one-man band who did no studying ahead of time, we were solidly impressed.

While McGee admitted he might have overestimated his ability to ace the test beforehand, he pointed out that his historical bona fides did afford him a certain advantage.

“I would have foolishly guessed that I would have known, like, 80%, because I thought perhaps it would lean more into history and my days growing up in the Triangle in the 1980s and ’90s,” he said. “When we got to the current stuff that only a student would know (“What is the name of the gym that Cam Boozer’s girlfriend works at?”!!!) I could feel myself losing the edge. But also, I’m betting not a lot of current students know who Mike Gminski and Jeff Mullins are.”

Indeed, McGee’s strongest sections were the first and third, which largely focus on topics like Duke record holders and history. But he also chipped in a solid outing on Section 4, which has a focus on program traditions.

Asked what section he’d expect the test’s traditional takers to struggle with the most, he pointed to the specifics in the fifth section, concerning the current season.

“I’ve covered a lot of hoops at Cameron Indoor,” he said. “There are way too many empty airplane bottles of Fireball scattered on the floor of the student sections after those games for us to expect them to remember Maliq Brown’s stat line from the home game versus Lipscomb.”

McGee said that if he were to study for future versions of the test, he’d take more notes while watching games in November and December. Chang’s suggestion for possible future test takers would be to divvy up content and try to identify specialties among teammates. Ng Tang stressed that the most important factor for success on the test is loving Duke basketball.

The crux of co-vice president of tenting Afraaz Malick’s advice is a little more simple:

“I would start early.”