Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Craptacular day
Today is going particularly crappy, so I'm going to vent here in my blog. Sorry. Maybe it'll make me feel better.
Coming back from my week off (reading week), things went really well. I got back my midterm for Political Science 204 (Essentially one discussion about what is wrong with the current government structure). I got the highest mark in the class, that felt pretty good. Next day, yesterday, I got back my midterm for COMP229, System Software (OS theory and how assemblers/linkers/loaders/etc work). Second highest mark in the class. A big surprise, but I was happy.
Now, today. I wake up a bit late, and miss the first bus. I arrive to class (Cal 2) 25 minutes late. They've started a new subject, integration of rational functions. I arrive in the middle of it and have no idea what is going on. The first full example I witness on the board takes up four pages in my notebook. Four pages. I'm totally lost.
Next, after class ends, I get to pick up my midterm and past assignment. The assignment was one that I ran out of time while doing, so I only answered about half the questions. Problem is, the Math department are cheap bastards and only mark 4 or 5 questions randomly on each assignment, even if there are 20 qusetions. So guess what? 4 of the 5 questions they mark are the ones I didn't do, and they gave me zero on the one I did do with no explanation of what I did wrong. Perhaps I could have got some marks if they'd ACTUALLY MARKED THE STUFF THAT I DID DO!
And then the midterm. The mark at face value wasn't too bad. 70%. That is significantly higher than my marks on the Cal 1 midterm or final. Except the last three questions on the midterm were based on eachother. At the beginning of those three questions, I made one very small mistake, confusing the graphs of sqrt(x) and x^2. IE, I drew the curve convex when it should have been concave (I think). This was a find-volume-of-rotated-function type thing. Fine, they say, they give me half marks on that one. Fair enough, stupid mistake, but whatever. Except then they bomb me on the other two because they're based on a false assumption. So one tiny mistake on the first question cancels out all the work on the other two. I probably would have scored in the mid 80s had it not been for the concavity of a one inch long line on the paper.
So, in a course that was going relatively well, I'm lost when it comes to the material, got zero on an assignment, and lost a huge number of marks on one simple mistake on the midterm. Great way to ruin a good week.
Oh, and while I really want to apply to NITI for the co-op work term, my co-op co-ordinator hasn't yet responded to the email that I sent three days ago. Nice.
Coming back from my week off (reading week), things went really well. I got back my midterm for Political Science 204 (Essentially one discussion about what is wrong with the current government structure). I got the highest mark in the class, that felt pretty good. Next day, yesterday, I got back my midterm for COMP229, System Software (OS theory and how assemblers/linkers/loaders/etc work). Second highest mark in the class. A big surprise, but I was happy.
Now, today. I wake up a bit late, and miss the first bus. I arrive to class (Cal 2) 25 minutes late. They've started a new subject, integration of rational functions. I arrive in the middle of it and have no idea what is going on. The first full example I witness on the board takes up four pages in my notebook. Four pages. I'm totally lost.
Next, after class ends, I get to pick up my midterm and past assignment. The assignment was one that I ran out of time while doing, so I only answered about half the questions. Problem is, the Math department are cheap bastards and only mark 4 or 5 questions randomly on each assignment, even if there are 20 qusetions. So guess what? 4 of the 5 questions they mark are the ones I didn't do, and they gave me zero on the one I did do with no explanation of what I did wrong. Perhaps I could have got some marks if they'd ACTUALLY MARKED THE STUFF THAT I DID DO!
And then the midterm. The mark at face value wasn't too bad. 70%. That is significantly higher than my marks on the Cal 1 midterm or final. Except the last three questions on the midterm were based on eachother. At the beginning of those three questions, I made one very small mistake, confusing the graphs of sqrt(x) and x^2. IE, I drew the curve convex when it should have been concave (I think). This was a find-volume-of-rotated-function type thing. Fine, they say, they give me half marks on that one. Fair enough, stupid mistake, but whatever. Except then they bomb me on the other two because they're based on a false assumption. So one tiny mistake on the first question cancels out all the work on the other two. I probably would have scored in the mid 80s had it not been for the concavity of a one inch long line on the paper.
So, in a course that was going relatively well, I'm lost when it comes to the material, got zero on an assignment, and lost a huge number of marks on one simple mistake on the midterm. Great way to ruin a good week.
Oh, and while I really want to apply to NITI for the co-op work term, my co-op co-ordinator hasn't yet responded to the email that I sent three days ago. Nice.
