Is Failing a Midterm the End of the World?

[Cyrus]

Today I BOMBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBED my electronics mid term.

I think everyone did. I hope everyone does horrible and fails so my F becomes a B.

That test was stupid, wayyy too long and hard. Multiple choice too. I had to guess a few at the last 30 sec and just put something down.

I am so tired of school, next semester I am going to be part time. I've had enough of this sh!t.

I think I pulled a nasty 40-50% on that exam, if that. The teacher sucks, but the material is good. I hate school.

 

[matthew baird]

That's too bad Cyrus I would freak out if any of my test were like that...Luckily, I haven't scored below a 80 on any of my test so far this semester(cross fingers) I am to that point in the semester though where I'm starting to get burnt out, need new classes.
Hang in there!

 

[JasonRox]

Sounds like a **** hole.

I hope that doesn't happen to me when I take more classes. I'm currently in 4 courses where most people take 5. I will have 5 next term, so let's hope it goes fine.

Let's cross our fingers so that the rest of the class gets an F, and cyrus' mark becomes an A+!

 

[Cyrus]

That happened in heat transfer. I got a 53/70, but the class avg. was a 37/70 so I ended up with an A-.

But honestly, I just hate that electronics class, and I hate my materials class. Nothing would please me more than to just drop them both but I am stuck in them.

And our teacher hates us back. He has even said so. He's always complaining to us and gets angry. He gave us a practice exam that was a joke and nothing like his mid term. Sad part is, I really just dont care anymore.

I hope they all get F's. Every one of them.

A+, no chance in hell. Not even an A-. At best, a B-, if I am lucky.

 

[JasonRox]

That happened in heat transfer. I got a 53/70, but the class avg. was a 37/70 so I ended up with an A-.

But honestly, I just hate that electronics class, and I hate my materials class. Nothing would please me more than to just drop them both but I am stuck in them.

And our teacher hates us back. He has even said so. He's always complaining to us and gets angry. He gave us a practice exam that was a joke and nothing like his mid term. Sad part is, I really just dont care anymore.

I hope they all get F's. Every one of them.

A+, no chance in hell. Not even an A-. At best, a B-, if I am lucky.

Our school has a policy not to Bell Curve, so that's tricky for to fix for our school.

Anyways, the same thing happened with my girlfriend in Heat Transfer. (She goes to a different school.)

 

[Astronuc]

What's the EE class - circuits? AC? Signal analysis?

And what's the Materials Eng/ Mat Sci class?

Cheer up Cyrus, I just spent an hour trying to figure why I was getting a core dump. . . . . I had filled the disk. My inputs were OK (I had change 1 number, and a similar case had just ran successfully), my model is OK, there is not bug in the code (same executable ran fine in the previous case), . . . I had just ran out of physical memory on a 49 GB disk.

I have to have results by tomorrow morning, and it's going to take several hours to get through the runs (about 45 min/case).

 

[turbo]

My Chemistry final was a bear, and I didn't think that I got more than 50-60% of the answers right, but thanks to scaling, I ended up with an A that pulled my average up to a B. I did a whole lot better in the Fall semester, but losing almost a month to back-to-back bronchitis/mononeucleosis in February/March really screwed me and I thought that I might fail some courses, though I managed to pull through it OK. It's tough to carry a full load of freshman Engineering courses plus an Honors program and electives if you give up a month of lectures, labs, recitations, etc.

Good luck on the scores. If the test was that tough, chances are they'll have to grade on a scale in order to give fair grades. Frankly, if I designed a test that at least one or two people could ace, I would toughen it up the next time around.

 

[Chi Meson]

Glad to hear things are still the same. I remember fondly my 27% on an exam that turned out to be a B. Bizarre thing was, the few things I got right (on the two problems) were simple, first year elementary stuff.

Does this ring any bells for you out there? thinking:
"I don't even know what I should be studying for this test!"

 

[fourier jr]

Today I BOMBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBED my electronics mid term.

I think everyone did. I hope everyone does horrible and fails so my F becomes a B.

That test was stupid, wayyy too long and hard. Multiple choice too. I had to guess a few at the last 30 sec and just put something down.

I am so tired of school, next semester I am going to be part time. I've had enough of this sh!t.

I think I pulled a nasty 40-50% on that exam, if that. The teacher sucks, but the material is good. I hate school.

it might have been the prof trying to trick everyone into studying harder for the course. i had this one instructor for odes in one fall term & on the first midterm he put brutal problems (wel not so much brutal as long) & graded extra strict & everyone failed. when he handed them back he told us don't worry how we did compared with everyone else, it was us against the course material etc etc. ii suppose it was to make everyone study harder for the next midterm & final. i had the same guy for pdes in the spring term & he did the exact same thing, as i expected.

 

[berkeman]

Back in my harder undergrad lower division physics courses (with plenty of engineering students), the median score was often 50%, and the class was graded on a bell curve. But then again, I loved those classes, and it sounds like you're not enjoying yours. Hopefully things will get better, Cyrus. Hang in there.

 

[Cyrus]

This guy gives the trickiest damn multiple choice questions you ever saw in your life. He loves to do that crap every semester. If you don't see the trick to them, you can waste all your time on just the multiple choice which is worth 50%.

I am sick of staying up late day in and day out. I have had one test every week for 4 weeks straight, and another one next week.

I went to the 7-11 last night when studying for my exam at the library, and all the girls were dressed in slutty costumes going to the bars. AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I should have done communications.

Oh yeah, and I hope they all fail. Yes, I am ruthless...but I don't really care.

 

[Knavish]

Less PF, more studying!

 

[Moonbear]

That's okay, our grad students were just tortured with an awful exam too. A couple of them came by to hand it in when the faculty member collecting them was out of his office (they had several hours to work on it), so the person I was talking with at the door of my office took them for him. We took a look at the exam, and seriously had to sympathize with those students. My hand would have fallen off if I had to write essay answers to that many questions, which is what they were asked to do. Plus, just the range of topics on this exam was pretty broad, and jumped all over the place (I'm not sure how they decide what topics to cover on a single exam). It looked more like a final exam than a midterm, and even then, it was a lot. It seems to be suffering from the "choose 2 of the following 3 questions" problem that sometimes happens when you have multiple faculty writing a single exam...they all tried to write a hard question so they wouldn't have many students answer it so they wouldn't have to grade that many exams. I'm curious to find out how the students did...probably not very well. But, geez, if they did do well, they'll be real stars.

 

[JasonRox]

That's okay, our grad students were just tortured with an awful exam too. A couple of them came by to hand it in when the faculty member collecting them was out of his office (they had several hours to work on it), so the person I was talking with at the door of my office took them for him. We took a look at the exam, and seriously had to sympathize with those students. My hand would have fallen off if I had to write essay answers to that many questions, which is what they were asked to do. Plus, just the range of topics on this exam was pretty broad, and jumped all over the place (I'm not sure how they decide what topics to cover on a single exam). It looked more like a final exam than a midterm, and even then, it was a lot. It seems to be suffering from the "choose 2 of the following 3 questions" problem that sometimes happens when you have multiple faculty writing a single exam...they all tried to write a hard question so they wouldn't have many students answer it so they wouldn't have to grade that many exams. I'm curious to find out how the students did...probably not very well. But, geez, if they did do well, they'll be real stars.

I would have walked out.

I already have plans to search for good graduate schools in January. I will visit them, talk to them, talk to graduate students, and so on. I don't want to go to a school that's going to waste lots of time on pointless junk. I know it sounds stupid, but I'm sure there is a school out there that can meet my needs and where I can meet theirs. I'll settle for a smallerish faculty and department in return for less nonsense.

 

[Moonbear]

I would have walked out.

I already have plans to search for good graduate schools in January. I will visit them, talk to them, talk to graduate students, and so on. I don't want to go to a school that's going to waste lots of time on pointless junk. I know it sounds stupid, but I'm sure there is a school out there that can meet my needs and where I can meet theirs. I'll settle for a smallerish faculty and department in return for less nonsense.

It wasn't pointless junk, but just too much in one exam. I would have recommended breaking it down into two separate tests. It looked more like a qualifying exam than an exam for a single course. Well, at least it'll start preparing them for that.

 

[Math Is Hard]

This guy gives the trickiest damn multiple choice questions you ever saw in your life. He loves to do that crap every semester. If you don't see the trick to them, you can waste all your time on just the multiple choice which is worth 50%.

I am sick of staying up late day in and day out. I have had one test every week for 4 weeks straight, and another one next week.

I went to the 7-11 last night when studying for my exam at the library, and all the girls were dressed in slutty costumes going to the bars. AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, I should have done communications.

Oh yeah, and I hope they all fail. Yes, I am ruthless...but I don't really care.

Want me to kill him for you? I don't think he'd be missed.

 

[chroot]

On Tuesday, I was subjected to a 75-minute VLSI circuit design midterm that consisted of 16 pages. Yes, that's right, an average of less than five minutes per page of questions that often require half a page of math to solve.

At least the TA said most students don't finish.

- Warren

 

[JasonRox]

It wasn't pointless junk, but just too much in one exam. I would have recommended breaking it down into two separate tests. It looked more like a qualifying exam than an exam for a single course. Well, at least it'll start preparing them for that.

That's what I mean by pointless junk. You sum up so much stuff in one midterm. It becomes junk because most of it can not be done, which makes it a junk midterm. Like, the professor needs to learn how to write them.

I wouldn't definitely make a comment to the professor with regards to the midterm.

Note: I've already made comments about midterms that were just too tight or flat out too easy (yes, I've commented on easy ones too). They never took offence because their goal is to write good midterms. And I know it's really difficult at our school because of how mixed up the students are, hence I respect the challenges.

But it's not like they ever gave us a midterm that could that be completed by anyone. I would freak. I just wasted hard work and time at something that can not be completed.

 

[Moonbear]

That's what I mean by pointless junk. You sum up so much stuff in one midterm. It becomes junk because most of it can not be done, which makes it a junk midterm. Like, the professor needs to learn how to write them.

I wouldn't definitely make a comment to the professor with regards to the midterm.

Note: I've already made comments about midterms that were just too tight or flat out too easy (yes, I've commented on easy ones too). They never took offence because their goal is to write good midterms. And I know it's really difficult at our school because of how mixed up the students are, hence I respect the challenges.

But it's not like they ever gave us a midterm that could that be completed by anyone. I would freak. I just wasted hard work and time at something that can not be completed.

Oh, it could be completed, I just felt sorry for the students because their hands had to fall off writing so much. They had several hours to write it. Though, having seen it myself, I will mention something to them about it (the problem is that it's not just one person teaching...it's a grad level course, so multiple faculty each teach their own part and each write their questions...unfortunately, one of them should have taken a moment to look through them all in advance and make sure it wasn't too much when put together). I don't know if they're held to some university schedule for setting the date of the midterm, or if they have some flexibility in that. If they have flexibility, I'm going to recommend they break down the units a bit and spread out the material over 3 or 4 exams during the term instead of just a midterm and final.

I wouldn't call it a waste of time though. If they learned nothing else, they learned not to do it to their own students one day. These are all PhD students, so we expect that many of them will wind up teaching eventually.

 

[Evo]

Today I BOMBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBED my electronics mid term.

I think everyone did. I hope everyone does horrible and fails so my F becomes a B.

That test was stupid, wayyy too long and hard. Multiple choice too. I had to guess a few at the last 30 sec and just put something down.

I am so tired of school, next semester I am going to be part time. I've had enough of this sh!t.

I think I pulled a nasty 40-50% on that exam, if that. The teacher sucks, but the material is good. I hate school.

<smacks cyrus on the back of the head with a Chesapeake Bay bluefish>

 

[Cyrus]

Yeah... I just registered for next semester, part time and 3 courses. I need a break from the grind. I went to bed last night at 4 am, again doing HW, and slept through the alarm and woke up at 11:30 today. Drove to school at 70mph, and turned in the (vibrations) HW late and he took it by the grace of god since he likes me, which he would not do for others. I am sick and tired of being sick and tired. I have been sick for 3 weeks now. I hateeeee this semester.

 

[Alkatran]

Luckily, I've never run into an impossible midterm. The closest I've come is the algorithms midterm, which I had to rush to finish up before he told us to stop.

It had one of those "magic algorithm" questions that wants you to figure out what a particular function does. I must have spent 20 minutes at the end of the exam just staring at the monstrosity until I caught on it was slowly rearranging and dividing the bits, then counting them. Best. Feeling. Ever.

 

[JasonRox]

I think everyone went KABOON in my Linear Algebra class.

I finished marking the midterms and the average is like 58%! The median is probably around 55% or so. The midterm is worth 26% too!

No bell curving too!

 

[berkeman]

No bell curving too!

I'm curious -- why no bell curve?

 

[Cyrus]

What's the EE class - circuits? AC? Signal analysis?

And what's the Materials Eng/ Mat Sci class?

Cheer up Cyrus, I just spent an hour trying to figure why I was getting a core dump. . . . . I had filled the disk. My inputs were OK (I had change 1 number, and a similar case had just ran successfully), my model is OK, there is not bug in the code (same executable ran fine in the previous case), . . . I had just ran out of physical memory on a 49 GB disk.

I have to have results by tomorrow morning, and it's going to take several hours to get through the runs (about 45 min/case).

My materials class is some BS they make all the ME's take. Stuff like diffusion, stress-strain, Fracture mechanics, Fatigue life, Eutectic systems, heat treatments of steels, crystal structures...:zzz: :zzz: :zzz: :zzz: :zzz:

Sorry, what was I blabbing on about? That class is basic algebra and memorization. It's the dumbest crap I have ever sat through.

 

[Moonbear]

If you post next week that you got a 90% on that exam, I'm going to smack you with that same fish Evo smacked you with, and I'm not putting it in the fridge either!

I took an exam once where a 13% got me a B. The professor seemed surprised at how poorly we all scored, and we just sat there still wondering where he even pulled the questions from. Even when we got the exam back, we couldn't find any of it in the book, so it's not like we missed it while reading, and it sure wasn't anything he covered in class. We don't know if he was reusing exams based on an old textbook, or what. I think the high score was about a 30% from the one anal retentive classmate who usually got upset if she only got a 98% on something. So, best we could tell, only about 30% of the material on the exam was actually covered somewhere in the course material.

 

[Cyrus]

The material was stuff we covered. And to be fair, the open ended part was not that bad. I made a stupid mistake on the first part because I forgot a term in my denominator, and that screwed up my answer. That meant that my part b-c were wrong thanks to part a.

Now that multiple choice part, that was horrible. He took the most obscure crap he could find. I have a printout of all the slides we did in class, and he put a problem that we had done on the board but was not on the slide. This is really obscure because he never writes on the board and always teaches from power point. So that was one of the very few times he ever wrote something on the board, and the reason why no one takes notes in that class (all the power points are online, why take notes?).

I looked back on my answers, and I know I lost at least 25-30points on it. I did really really really really bad on the exam.

Now my grade is going to depend on how bad everyone else did relative to me.

I can tell you one thing, he is going to be pisssssssssed come monday. He is going to say, 'I can see you all don't study hard and take this class seriously.'

One time he told us, your lab reports are bad, this is not 350, this is 351. 350 was last semseter. He really hates us, ahahahah.

 

[JasonRox]

If you post next week that you got a 90% on that exam, I'm going to smack you with that same fish Evo smacked you with, and I'm not putting it in the fridge either!

I took an exam once where a 13% got me a B. The professor seemed surprised at how poorly we all scored, and we just sat there still wondering where he even pulled the questions from. Even when we got the exam back, we couldn't find any of it in the book, so it's not like we missed it while reading, and it sure wasn't anything he covered in class. We don't know if he was reusing exams based on an old textbook, or what. I think the high score was about a 30% from the one anal retentive classmate who usually got upset if she only got a 98% on something. So, best we could tell, only about 30% of the material on the exam was actually covered somewhere in the course material.

Wow! Reminds me of the exam the professor told us about. He scored the second highest on his first algebra exam (guessing graduate school) and he got 34%!

 

[berkeman]

I'm curious -- why no bell curve?

BUMP.

 

[fourier jr]

I'm curious -- why no bell curve?

probably because the prof is a hardass who wants the students to study hard

 

[JasonRox]

BUMP.

It's against school policy to do so. You'd have to find another way around it, like a bonus assignment or knock out a question that everyone got wrong.

 

[Moonbear]

It's against school policy to do so. You'd have to find another way around it, like a bonus assignment or knock out a question that everyone got wrong.

Okay, no bell curve, but what about just setting a fixed scale that bumps everyone up or giving everyone a free 20 points for spelling their name right or some such? I used to have professors who would start out the term by telling us no bell curves, and when we all freaked out, at the end of the term, they pointed out that we really didn't want a bell curve, because that would mean most of us would get Cs even if we really deserved Bs. It was a ploy to make us work as hard as we could to do the best we could without relying on adjusted scores to get our grades up, and also taught us a lesson on what a bell curve really is.

 

[JasonRox]

Okay, no bell curve, but what about just setting a fixed scale that bumps everyone up or giving everyone a free 20 points for spelling their name right or some such? I used to have professors who would start out the term by telling us no bell curves, and when we all freaked out, at the end of the term, they pointed out that we really didn't want a bell curve, because that would mean most of us would get Cs even if we really deserved Bs. It was a ploy to make us work as hard as we could to do the best we could without relying on adjusted scores to get our grades up, and also taught us a lesson on what a bell curve really is.

Well, that becomes a problem because someone already has 100%, so how is it fair to her? (It's a girl.)

Sometimes they'll do things like if the highest mark on the test out of 35 is 30, then the test will be out of 30. Therefore, someone always gets a 100%, but again we can't even do that.

I'm not sure what's going to happen. People aren't taking the class too seriously though. You can totally tell people are copying off each other on assignments and the test displayed those in the group that actually did work.

 

[JasonRox]

Okay, no bell curve, but what about just setting a fixed scale that bumps everyone up or giving everyone a free 20 points for spelling their name right or some such? I used to have professors who would start out the term by telling us no bell curves, and when we all freaked out, at the end of the term, they pointed out that we really didn't want a bell curve, because that would mean most of us would get Cs even if we really deserved Bs. It was a ploy to make us work as hard as we could to do the best we could without relying on adjusted scores to get our grades up, and also taught us a lesson on what a bell curve really is.

Yeah, but this isn't a ploy.

The first year Calculus class had an average of 38% on the midterm. The professor asked our class (3rd year class) on possible solutions to correct this and such. He directly said no bell curving.