Sunday, March 12, 2006
farewell gpa.. it was nice knowing ya
So I had a pretty nice GPA for the first four semesters of University. I will call it a value of X. I was very consistent.
First semester, I got X. Second semester, I got X. Third semester I was pretty distracted.. so I got X-0.1. Then in fourth semester I worked a little harder to get, yes, X.
I have written all my midterms for my fifth semester... and unfortunately, I am below average in two of my courses. I have not receieved my midterms back from two courses but I am positive I am below average in one of them. This is very bad.
I suppose I can't worry about it too much now but just kick into gear for finals.
I have gotten my worst midterm mark ever and my best midterm mark ever this semester. I will now stop talking about depressing things and talk about my best midterm mark:
CIV E 330 Fluid mechanics is a complicated subject. You can never predict what kind of questions are going to be on the exam. As our professor says, "There are millions of possibilities for exam questions for fluid mechanics. You will never be able to fully prepare yourself for an exam." How comforting, eh?
So I knew I'd be screwed for the exam. I tried just studying theory but it was too boring haha. I ended up just doing some problems and fretting about the exam.
The exam was three questions worth ten marks each. The first question was all theoretical. I wasn't sure what to write and I must have re-written my answer four times. I just barfed up all the knowledge I had on the subject of the problem and went onto the next question...
I turned the page to see the most beautiful thing ever. It was a canister that involved calculating the volume of a frustrum. Why was it so beautiful? B/c I had seen the exact same question on an old assignment from last semester. The sight of the canister brought forth an even more beautiful image in my mind: the very clearly written solution from the answer key to the assignment. I even remembered the answers so I could check my calcs once I had finished the question. Next question!
Okay.. so I needed to calculate velocity of the flow of air around a chimney. I could do that. The tricky part was calculating the pressure created. I had no idea how to do that. During the middle of the exam our prof wrote Bernoulli's eqn on the board. I hadn't used it yet.. I figured this was a good time to use it... I mean.. there was a P in the eqn... haha.. I was so lost I had no option but to use it. I plugged in random numbers and wrote my assumptions down and was pretty sure I got the last question half wrong but oh well... I just wanted to get it over w/.
The exams were marked. The prof told us this in class, "I marked the exams. You did very poorly haha.. (he actually laughed here..) I thought the environmental coop and civil coop students were the smart ones.. I will have to scale the exam probably down to 20." We were like.. wait.. the exam was out of 30.. that's a whole third of the exam..
He ended up scaling it out of 21.
We went to get our exams back (he said he wanted us to get the exams back from him personally so he could see our faces when we find out what our mark was..). I was w/ Brendan and he went in first. He got 95% after scaling.. he was pretty happy but not happy that he would have done pretty crappy before scaling. I went into the prof's office and he's all smiling haha.. pretty creepy. But he remembered me b/c I went to ask him a question about an assignment before. He gave my exam back and was like, you're one of the few ppl who did really well on the exam.
I got 30... bwahaha.. that means I got 143%.. hahaha.. awesome.. too bad I did so shitty on all my other exams eh?
But yea.. recently I've been really distracted. Sigh.. stupid me for being distracted but I can't help it. Meh.. at least midterms are over.
Posted by norwegian girl at 10:30 p.m.