Liberal Arts Major
A brief rundown:
"Advanced Calculus": 76/100. Of those, 7 points were lost by my failure to realize there were two instances of a variable in an expression, and the rest were lost on an optimization problem I didn't finish because I wasted too much time failing to realize there were two instances of a variable in an expression. Oh, and the class median was 86. Everything on this test was super easy.
"Linear Analysis": 38/42. I didn't have time to reduce a matrix correctly so I just guessed at the answer and I'm not a good guesser. I also managed to not multiply out a matrix correctly. This is what I'm calling a win now. Everything on this test was super easy.
Real Analysis II: 71/100. 15 of those points were lost on a proof I wrote correctly, decided was wrong, and replaced with nonsense. The rest were lost for slightly less stupid reasons. Everything on this test was super easy.
Computer Programming II: 70/100. Surprise! I've actually spent the past few minutes writing out actual answers to the questions on the midterm (which, unlike pedestrian things like the information I was being tested on, I remember) and oh God did I make a mess of this, a fact that slowly dawned on me as I was trying to remember my idiotic "solutions" in detail. I did things like set s.charAt(n) equal to something and expect it to stick (while correctly using substrings a line below - like a boss), performed evaluations with = instead of ==, wrote a method that literally didn't follow the specification, and so on. A retarded chimpanzee would have done better on this - or, failing that, any random student, since the mean was over 77. Everything on this test was super easy.
Perhaps you've noticed a trend: these tests were not hard. They were, in fact, all super easy. The problems I did wrong were not problems I have any suitable excuse for doing wrong except that I'm a failure at
(Though I wasn't exactly in the right mental state for the computer programming midterm: I had just gotten my 76/100 back a couple of hours earlier, which essentially erased all the psychological preparation I had put into, uh, distinguishing between = and ==.)
To put things in perspective, like normal humans we did Lagrange multipliers in calculus at BSU, and for some reason at the UW that's part of the fifth-quarter curriculum, so we had some of it on the midterm in "Advanced Calculus", where I missed 17 points because I didn't have time to finish on account of spending too much time looking at the system of equations and despairing. There was actually a more involved version of this problem on a midterm I took at BSU. The difference is I got full credit on that one and remember thinking it was, well, super easy.
So in the space of two years, I went from being able to do complex problems in a timely manner to being a total basket case. Stick a fork in me.
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~ Ogordemir ~
"The sciences have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." ~ H.P Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu