Outrunning the Bear

I've now gotten back all four of the exams that I took these past few days...and I slam-dunked them all. No perfect scores because I am a rather imperfect being, although I got pretty close.

So that animal genetics exam that I thought I did poorly on? I felt very time-pressured while taking it and was sure that caused me to make errors. But I shouldn't make such pronouncements without any data. I made the highest score in the class! The instructor told me that he expected no less of me (he and I have talked several times in his office about vet careers and such so he knows about my past; good grief, I'm a woman with a past), which was nice of him, I suppose, but way to put the pressure on. Because too many people failed to get any points on three questions, the instructor is curving every score up 8 points--I happened to get full or partial credit on those three questions so my final curved score will be more than 100%. Go figure.

The biochem exam was by far the most difficult of the four but as I was taking it, I felt that I was managing my time well and that I at least addressed the main components of every question. The instructor of this very large course curves every exam individually, so to excel you only need to do better than the mean of the scores for that particular exam (put another way, to escape a bear, you only need to run faster than your friend, not necessarily faster than the bear). I made 90% which put me firmly into A territory with the curve. Now 90% is technically a weak A if the scores are graded on traditional bins but the cutoff for an A on this exam was around 83 so a 90 is respectable; I ran quite a bit faster than most of the rest of the class. One guy made 102 (there was an extra credit question); he ran faster than the bear for sure but that doesn't matter when there's a curve.

I nailed my French exam. I still make stupid mistakes like forget to add "s" to plural adjectives or use the 3rd person plural for a verb when I meant to use the 3rd person singular; my most common mistake is to use de when it is not needed and omit it when it is required. Fucking de. What a sneaky little article. But Madame Denis is a generous grader and seems pleased with my creative writing attempts (we had four short creative writing questions on the exam along with the usual fill-in-the-blank and dictation). She liked my "love with dry bread" story, putting smiley faces in my notebook along with some comments (why does that make me feel like a six-year-old who just got two gold stars for coloring nicely?).

I had a bit of a tiff with my animal nutrition instructor about the wording of one question and the answer I chose versus the answer she marked as correct in the exam key. She is not a very good instructor although I think she knows the material very well. I won't get into the pedantic details of why she sucks in the classroom, but let's say that my years of experience with such matters gives me a bit of a platform from which to offer an opinion. Anyway, perhaps my snit-o-gram made her rethink that particular problem because she announced in class today that she would give credit to anyone who selected the other answer, the one I argued was in fact correct given the parameters she laid out in the question. I had already earned a very good score so those additional few points were hardly going to change my grade, but you gotta pick your battles and I felt that one was worth picking.

The effort I put into studying for the exams was tremendous and it was well rewarded. But there is no rest for the wicked. Well, okay, I am taking tonight off. The wicked will have one study-free night. I'll be doing my monthly accounts and budget instead. I've already started drinking some very fine local craft beer. Tasty!

My Saturday will start early with my second skype call to the two French students I'm assigned to talk with (I get a twofer because Thomas, a friend of Guillaume who was assigned as my partner, ended up without a partner and he really wanted to be involved). Then I have homework assignments and extra credit reports and the next round of exams to get ready for. And dogs to walk and play with. The usual quotidian drama.

I'm still fairly bemused by this whole student thing. I'm enjoying it, certainly. I'm learning tons of new and challenging concepts. I'm very slowly starting to get to know a few people here and there. I can see that there is a reasonable number of very smart young people in all of my classes, but sadly not much has changed in 30 years--most of the young people filling up the seats in the classrooms seem far more interested in parties, football games, and drinking. In the end, I suppose that's good for both me and the bear.