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Got 4% on my first (and only) calc midterm. I statistically should have gotten a better grade by randomly picking multiple choice questions and leaving everything else blank... Sadly it didn't provide anything to the rest of my class and I had actually studied for it.
Your calc exam was multiple choice?
They say leave the rest blank, so there was some multiple choice questions, which is fairly normal. Well, at least I think it is, all the maths tests ive done have had at least a few multiple choice qs (UK)
Well not the whole thing. Maybe a third of the questions or something like that.
Depending on the question, many answers in calculus are:
- 1
- 2
- 0
- invalid
This is especially true if they don't let you have a calculator.
This is especially true if they don’t let you have a calculator.
Maybe I'm old and come from a time before calculators could do integrals and derivatives, but I never needed a calculator for calculus as it would not have helped in any way.
And I don't think there being four possible answers that come up frequently is a reason to make a calculus test multiple choice. What about partial credit? If you show all of your work, but make a small error at the end and get the wrong answer, you're just fucked I guess? That's dumb. Not a great way to teach.
Statistically an outlier like that shouldn't count.
Yep. Should have used q2/median
For anyone who wants to repeat OP's experience:
Also I once scored a 3 out of 200 on a final exam and failed the fuck out of a class.
Properly made open book exams are not easier. The opposite.
Open book where the question merely implies needing to know X without spelling it out is where it really gets hard
That, and also when the questions require actual understanding instead of memorized knowledge.
Also, our professors tended to make open book exams so tight on time that you couldn't realistically look most things up.
One of the toughest classes I ever took had a final exam that was 24 hours long but it was done at home. It wasn't just open book, it was open internet. The only requirement was that we completed it individually.
It was the first and only exam I slept in the middle of.
It was something like 6 essay style questions in a CS topic, you had to pick 3 to answer.
It was my favourite exam. Not that I generally do badly on more traditional style exams (closed book, cheatsheet, open book, whatever), and not that it was easier because of the format. But it challenged us in real ways rather than test how much we memorized from the course material.
The assignments were similar, assignment 0 was to implement a console to run on an embedded system without an OS or standard libraries or anything other then a UART we could send one byte at a time over. We didn't even have print statements until we implemented them and got them to work (that was fun to debug). It was deliberately set up like that to encourage people to drop the course early so people on the waitlist could get their spot.
Listened to a podcast yesterday where the lesson was don't procrastinate except when it helps you because someone else implements the solution for you. Same vibes.
I did the opposite of this once by being the only one to score 100%
I had a professor in my government and private organizations interactions class who was clear that he'd never given a "true" 100% on a paper before and was confident they never would. They'd just adjust it so that the best paper would get bumped to 100, and everyone else would get the same bump. So if the best was what he'd consider an 85, everyone would get a 15 point bump.
He was essentially making the point that the subject was too complex. I took it to mean that he was a harsh grader and expected way too much out of students.
Later that semester, I had a paper and presentation in which I decided, stupidly, to try and map out the history of the intersection between corporate personhood and campaign finance. I basically wanted to bitch about Citizens United (this was in like 2013).
So I started with Citizens United and worked my way back through Supreme Court cases tracking precedent. I got a little obsessed because I actually found it fascinating, and I ended up having like 25 SCOTUS cases summarized across over 200 years and before I knew it, I had a 60-page paper.
At that point, I knew it was way too long (there had been a 10-page minimum), but I was out of time, so instead of editing it down I just had to turn it in at 11:59pm. My presentation was like 20 minutes in which I was rushed, and I felt pretty bad about it.
The next week the professor came in and opened with 2 announcements. 1 was that there was now a 15-page limit on any papers, and that for the first time in 35 years he'd given a "true" 100. Because of the presentation I'd done, everyone knew it was me that blew the curve, so I didn't know whether to be proud, embarrassed, or scared about it.
The laptop I wrote the paper on was stolen a few months later and I didn't have a backup of the paper, which is a shame because I'd love to read it today and see if it really was good, or if I just wore him out with citations.
Screw you.
yea everyone hated me for this. i never do well on tests, but this one i studied for and i ate shit for it
How dare you be responsible. 😁
the teacher called me out on it because he hated me for aesthetic reasons. wanted everyone to know that i ruined the curve. i didn't understand what happened until i was much older
Mean vs median.
Math prof ought to know better than to include outliers.
Maths prof, not statistics prof.
Wow, I wish my professor had that policy. I got a 32% on an exam last week, and the class averaged at 54%. Haven't heard a peep from him about it. I've never done so poorly in a class out of incompetence. I feel so fucking stupid thinking about retaking the course.
I had an engineering professor in freshman year give exams expecting the class average to be 50% of the available points, and just graded on a curve based on how many standard deviations we were from the mean. So a 50 was generally good enough for a B. It was not a statistics class, but I think I learned more about statistics from that class than any other.
I'm just tired of constantly struggling. I wish there was some way to tell if I'm capable of doing engineering, you know? Let me know if I'm wasting my time or not.
Maybe talk to your professor then?
Oh, I meant, like, on the whole. This class might just be a speed bump on the path, but I don't know if there won't be something insurmountable next time around.
Sure, and the professor should know that. They can figure out what you're struggling with and help you decide if you just need TA time or something else.
Dude, I did really well in grade school despite all the issues caused by my shitty parents. I went out on my own and went to college and watched my grades go to shit. I quit smoking weed and saw my grades improve immensely. I finished college with mostly A's and B's.
Some people can go to class and smoke weed 24/7, but I'm willing to bet that most can't. I definitely can't, it makes me way too lazy. Think about your habits. As long as you read the material you're given you should be able to pass with a decent grade without trying to hard.
From what I've seen, engineering is just a lot of physics classes. If you're struggling, definitely you'll need to develop more serious study habits, but it's worth it. There's so few good stable jobs left, and engineering is one of them. Maybe find a tutor, good YouTube lectures, maybe Khan academy. Whatever it takes. Maybe you need to do each type of problem a dozen times to get it, not just once. That's a bummer, but it's worth the effort. School is much much harder than real world. Everyone I know who is an engineer agrees that the schooling was the hardest part.
True self-sacrifice.