Answer comparison

A few of my classmates and I compared our answers from the exam. It looks like I probably did very well. We all seem to have lost marks somewhere. I hope for good things when I get my mark back in a couple of months.

The course is not being re-run this term, but the exam is being offered at the end of the term for rewrite purposes (for those students who failed but were in the rewrite range). I hate seeing that. The anticipation of failing grades and required rewrites seems rather defeatist. By the same token, I recognize that each course in this program carries at least a 35% fail rate. I guess you've got to play the odds.

People in a couple of other courses are irritated by their exams. It seems the stuff they studied hard on wasn't on the exam. They followed the exam blueprint and did a bunch of the past and practice exams, and were thus taken by surprise when the exam followed a different format and didn't adhere to the blueprint. I don't blame them. I know our resources all say that they are only guidelines, and that students are responsible for all the material in the course. But we have to have some reliance on the resources we are given for exam prep. I hope the students fared better than they think.

A couple of students actually said "I studied so hard on [this one subject area], all for nothing". I think that's either a bad way to express yourself or else kind of a bad attitude. Did you learn it? Yes? Well, then it wasn't "all for nothing", was it? We're in this to learn, not just to write an exam and move on. Still, I think I understand what they are trying to say. And I must admit I'd be mighty ticked off if something like this happened to me. I hope it never does.