oh em eff gee!!!

[pemberleya]

grades are finally in. now that classes have started. to really get this, you have to understand that i haven't gotten an A in a class in my major since i was 18. i got A's in english classes and history and easy stuff, but i did 6 times that much work for each science and math class and got B's and a healthy crop of C's

Comments

[pemberleya]

dude. seriously. i was shooting for, like, i would be happy and it would be awesome if i could just get a nice solid B run. i'm not going to be over this for about a week. the thing you're going to have working in your favor, as long as you're willing to be cool with B's and the occasional C, you're in business. at our school (and i can't fathom it would be much different at MD) the median grade is set to 85%, and then most people will fall nearby and 70% of the class gets B's. on the low side, there's a larger C margin than there is for D's and F's, so you have to be like, doing worse than 90% of ppl in the class to get a D or F. really, it's not hard (unless you have serious test-taking issues) to set yourself above like 10-15% of your classmates.

the other thing is that first-semester grades are often v. weird. everyone is guessing at what the professor is asking them to do on the test, because it's the only grade you get. it's not weird to get, like, one of every letter in your first semester. that's what the academic dean says. so, honestly, moral of story= do not worry about grades. work as hard as you can stand to, and you'll probably end up in business, since the B range comes with an enormous cushion.

[disembodiment]

I will be happy with B's, too. I hope the curve is the same at UMD; because it sounds like something I could live with. I am not going to be one of those people in law school who was a straight A student and then cries when they don't get straight A's in law school.

I don't have any real test taking issues, but I'm not sure how well I'll deal with the whole class being determined by one test. That seems kind of rough. Since I was a philosophy major, I wrote papers during all of undergrad. I don't think I took any tests.

This is all really encouraging because I am still pretty scared of starting in the fall. It doesn't quite seem real to me yet.