A for Awesome!
Over the past two weeks I had my first midterm in all my classes: calculus on my birthday October 2nd (at 8:30am!), and cell biology and organic chemistry on October 10th, at 8am and 2pm, respectively (yeah, now that was a fun day, with a couple of small quizzes thrown in for added fun during the math tutorial).
I received 70% on my calculus exam. It's much better than my usual scores of 55-65% from last term, but a bit disappointing, as I'm repeating the course. But at least I didn't fuck up as much did significantly better, and was also able to get full marks on the Intermediate Value Theorem question.
I found out the results of my organic chem test on Monday. After I wrote the test, I felt that I did well, even though I knew I missed at least one question, but I've learned that my feeling of how I did usually has no correlation to my actual score (often, I feel that I kicked ass on a test and get a horrible result, or I will walk away from a brutal test, guessing at most answers, hoping for part marks, and will end up with a much better grade than expected), so I was trying not to get my hopes up. As the teacher was handing out the marked tests, my heart was beating so hard. He handed back the tests face down, and when I flipped it over, I saw my mark, and slapped my hand against my beating heart in relief; I had managed to get 91%, an A+. Out of 40 students, 4 people received an A+.
I was feeling down about my mark on the cell biology test, because I studied very hard and had a good understanding of the majority of the material. I went into the test feeling confident, but found the test annoying and did not like the questions, as a lot of the material that I thoroughly knew and understood was not on the test, and I did not expect some of the questions. I felt like none of my answers were correct, and hoped that I would get enough part marks to scrape by. On Monday I had a cell biology class, and while the teacher had marked the tests, she was not handing them back until today. I was chatting to her before Monday's class and said that I was worried about my mark. She said that I did "well", having scored in the high 70s. By my standards for me, in biology and chemistry, high 70s in not great. It's OK, but I'm not happy with a B in a subject that I study very hard for, understand, and am majoring in and enjoy.
Anyway, we received our biology tests back this morning, and my mark was 77%, a B+. However, a student noticed that she had miscalculated how many marks the test was out of, and that it should be out of 69, not 73. So my mark was 56/69, which is 81%, boosting my grade up to an A-! Something else that made me happy is, I really lost the majority of marks on only one question, that I just botched up. I missed a couple of multiple choice questions, and for all the other "short" answer questions, I received full marks or nearly full marks. So I'm pleased that my test results, whatever the grade, show that I do understand most of the material, and not that I'm struggling with all of it.
Apparently, cell biology (but not first year biology) has the same grading system as the chemistry courses (this is for all chemistry courses, including the pre-college, not for university transfer credit courses). The regular grading scheme is as follows:
A+: >95%, A: >90%, A-: >85%. But for chemistry and cell biology (and perhaps for some other courses), the grading scheme is: A+: >90%, A: >85%, A-: >80%. Thank goodness! But believe me, when you have to take these difficult courses at 8am or 8:30am in the morning and have lab reports due almost every week, you need that lower marking scheme!
Is it any wonder that I'm not updating in LJ much?
I received 70% on my calculus exam. It's much better than my usual scores of 55-65% from last term, but a bit disappointing, as I'm repeating the course. But at least I didn't fuck up as much did significantly better, and was also able to get full marks on the Intermediate Value Theorem question.
I found out the results of my organic chem test on Monday. After I wrote the test, I felt that I did well, even though I knew I missed at least one question, but I've learned that my feeling of how I did usually has no correlation to my actual score (often, I feel that I kicked ass on a test and get a horrible result, or I will walk away from a brutal test, guessing at most answers, hoping for part marks, and will end up with a much better grade than expected), so I was trying not to get my hopes up. As the teacher was handing out the marked tests, my heart was beating so hard. He handed back the tests face down, and when I flipped it over, I saw my mark, and slapped my hand against my beating heart in relief; I had managed to get 91%, an A+. Out of 40 students, 4 people received an A+.
I was feeling down about my mark on the cell biology test, because I studied very hard and had a good understanding of the majority of the material. I went into the test feeling confident, but found the test annoying and did not like the questions, as a lot of the material that I thoroughly knew and understood was not on the test, and I did not expect some of the questions. I felt like none of my answers were correct, and hoped that I would get enough part marks to scrape by. On Monday I had a cell biology class, and while the teacher had marked the tests, she was not handing them back until today. I was chatting to her before Monday's class and said that I was worried about my mark. She said that I did "well", having scored in the high 70s. By my standards for me, in biology and chemistry, high 70s in not great. It's OK, but I'm not happy with a B in a subject that I study very hard for, understand, and am majoring in and enjoy.
Anyway, we received our biology tests back this morning, and my mark was 77%, a B+. However, a student noticed that she had miscalculated how many marks the test was out of, and that it should be out of 69, not 73. So my mark was 56/69, which is 81%, boosting my grade up to an A-! Something else that made me happy is, I really lost the majority of marks on only one question, that I just botched up. I missed a couple of multiple choice questions, and for all the other "short" answer questions, I received full marks or nearly full marks. So I'm pleased that my test results, whatever the grade, show that I do understand most of the material, and not that I'm struggling with all of it.
Apparently, cell biology (but not first year biology) has the same grading system as the chemistry courses (this is for all chemistry courses, including the pre-college, not for university transfer credit courses). The regular grading scheme is as follows:
A+: >95%, A: >90%, A-: >85%. But for chemistry and cell biology (and perhaps for some other courses), the grading scheme is: A+: >90%, A: >85%, A-: >80%. Thank goodness! But believe me, when you have to take these difficult courses at 8am or 8:30am in the morning and have lab reports due almost every week, you need that lower marking scheme!
Is it any wonder that I'm not updating in LJ much?