Midterms Week!

Hi!

My spring break starts in another 2 weeks and I should be happy about it. But these 2 weeks are midterm weeks.

NOPE, DONT LIKE THAT!

I had my first exam today for the course of Business Process Analysis for Information Systems. So, it wasn’t technically a mid term as this course doesn’t have any. However, the weightage for this exam is pretty high. So, I am going to consider it as a midterm.

Now, if you know me from my undergrad days you would know how unbothered I am by exams and grades. I mean, I never really studied during the 4 years of engineering and ended up with a very low GPA of 7.2/10 (=3/4). Well, when I started my masters I promised myself that I will not waste my time messing around with my guitar just the way I did during engineering and surprisingly I did quite well in my first semester. That consequently became the goal for this semester and the next one.

But guess what? I fucked up my first “midterm” of this semester. The exam was online and proctored on Zoom. I studied really hard for the exam, I was up all night trying to cover 1.5 months of syllabus in one night like a true engineer (never forget your roots) and I managed to finish the syllabus alongside some extra practice questions.

Cut to exam time, I got my question paper and I felt like this is my shit. You won’t believe it, but I actually knew every single answer. I started writing my exam and everything was going smoothly. However, I forgot one very important factor - keeping track of time. Now, the exam is on Zoom which is a video teleconferencing software and the whole point is to unmute yourself and SPEAK. But my professor decided to announce a very crucial information via the zoom ‘chat’ :)

A person who was up all night studying for this exam and knew every single thing on the paper, one can imagine the kind of dedication with which he must have been writing. How can you expect this poor child to check the ZOOM CHAT?!?!

Annnnnnd I wasn’t able to submit my exam as the portal got locked.

I was genuienly very sad about it and the reason behind it was that no matter how hard I try or even if I score full points in the finals, I am not getting an A grade. If you don’t know, during my undergraduate, it was only in my second year when I got to know that A+ is a thing because I always got straight Ds and Es. Never bothered to look beyond a C grade.

I was ranting to my friend - Snigdha and she asked me why an A grade was so important to me. This made me think about why the heck do we run towards the highest possible grade? I was so sad because of the fact that I will never get to score an A in this particular course that I never really considered that I knew everything on the exam.

I honestly still don’t have an answer to this. I should probably watch 3 idiots or something to get some sense into my head.

Thank you for reading my rant. Until next time. :)