It’s that part of the semester.
Spring Break was last week (to be honest, it wasn’t much of a break for me, as I stuck to my routine and replaced the time I spent in class with time outside), and I came back to school just in time to write a paper and do two exams all in one week. I turned in my paper last Monday (I’m writing this piece on Monday, March 25) and still haven’t gotten a grade back for it. I passed my Psychology 102 exam with an A, despite not spending a second studying for it, because I was too busy studying for our 3rd precalculus exam, which everyone in the class failed!
You read that right! Every single person, including myself, failed the 3rd precalculus exam. The highest grade was a 62%. I got a 58% (technically, I was a little ahead of the curve with that grade). What on God’s green earth went wrong?
Well… that’s precisely what I’m trying to figure out now.
I have the exam with me now, so I can see exactly what went wrong for me. I guess my still-shoddy understanding of trigonometry contributed to my failing grade, and I clearly panic-dialed some numbers into my calculator without checking them first, resulting in me losing a few points here and there. But, my fuck-ups don’t explain why the rest of the class did so poorly on the exam.
Worse, I can’t entirely blame myself for failing.
Why is that a bad thing? Well… when something is my fault, it means there are many steps I can take to fix my mistakes. Because math is really nothing more but a language with objectively correct and incorrect ways of doing it, I can learn from my mistakes and figure out precisely what went wrong. That’s what I’ve been doing for my homeworks, and so far, I’ve been scoring 80s and 90s on the homeworks.
However, homework is supposed to be used to study for the exam. If the exam looks next to nothing like the homework, and/or the homework/study guide only contains one or two problems that are similar to what ends up on the exam, then of course the entire class will fail! And believe me when I say the exam looked almost nothing like the homework, or what we tackled together as a class!
At least, that’s my best explanation for how an entire class of 30 college students failed this exam. If my failure was entirely my fault, I would’ve been a sorry outlier, not ahead of the fucking curve!
Deep breaths…
Good news is, my professor isn’t nearly as unreasonable as the majority of my K-12 teachers. Come Wednesday, we’ll have a chance to boost our grades with a quiz containing six problems similar to the ones found on the exam. I’ll be honest: I’m a little worried about Wednesday’s quiz, as this class hasn’t been as consistent as I’d hoped. A part of me thinks the quiz will test me on everything I won’t spend much time practicing over the next couple of days. But, I’m just gonna have to trust the professor here.
Worst case scenario, I keep my 58.8% for this exam, pass the final two unit exams with a 70% or above, and am able to replace the 58.8% with a passing final exam score. Worst, worst case scenario, I fail precalculus entirely, and take it over the summer with a different professor. Worst, worst, worst case scenario, I flunk precalc a second time and have to retake it again this fall.
But, I don’t anticipate the worst, worst, worst case scenario happening. Hell, I’m not betting on the worst, worst case scenario happening either. After all, I know I can do math. I figure it out just fine at home. I understand roughly 70% of what’s being taught in class on an average day, and I’m not afraid to ask for help from the professor (her office hours are just overlapped by my psychology class on most days). I’m well aware of the fact that STEM classes at ACC are not curved, so about half of the students in every STEM class end up failing it. I know that I’m doing my best, and my best has gotten me here (in a 5-credit precalculus class of all places).
In other words, I shouldn't beat myself up over an exam literally everyone else failed. Most likely, something way outside of my control happened for everyone to fail that exam, and it's pretty impressive that I still managed to get through that exam with a higher-than-average grade.
But, I also have some serious holes in my academic foundation that really need to be patched up and reinforced with rebar and concrete. The only way to do that is to put myself through classes that challenge and scare me, instead of getting on the Dean’s List by taking classes on things I already know a lot about.
I don’t go to those pompous Dean’s List dinners anyway. I’ve got better things to do, such as learn STEM. And learning STEM is not easy. It only becomes easy once one learns it, just like everything else that isn't innate to every human that ever has ever, is, and will ever exist.