PETALING JAYA, Aug 9 — Monkeying around should be the last thing a student should do before an exam, but one lecturer from Universiti Malaysia Perlis (UniMAP) made an exception.

A mid-semester exam paper for the subject Signals and Systems Principles, offered by UniMAP’s School of Computer and Communication Engineering, made it to the front page of Reddit’s forum yesterday for its amusing instructions.

Like most test papers, the front page tells students not to open the booklet until instructed to do so and provides them with a fun activity to hone their drawing skills in the meantime.

"Do not open booklet until instructed (but while you are waiting, why not learn how to draw a monkey?),” read the paper.

The instructions list out a step-by-step guide to sketching the primate and the viral picture even features a completed drawing by one of the students.

The image received than 58,000 upvotes on Reddit with many users praising it as a creative way to ease students’ anxiety and stress before an exam.

Other users joked that some candidates might accidentally spend too much time on the drawing without realising that the test had already started.