38

I just found out that I got a 38% on my final Operations research HW. Woohoo!! On this one, I was completely convinced that I'd gotten everything right. I'd even done practice problems ahead of time to make sure I knew what I was doing before I started the assignment and checked my answers in the back of the book to make sure my thought process was correct (it was).

Come to think of it, I've thought I'd gotten everything right on EVERY assignment in this class that I've bombed. It's nice to know that it would have been a waste of time to practice before doing the other assignments.

What happened? Well, we're only graded on getting the right answer, and since each problem builds on the last, I just made some simple mistake at the first step that carried through to subsequent problems. I got #1 right, but on problem #2, I wrote down the wrong number from a giant table, and that wrong answer carried me through problems 2-4. I got #5 and 6 right, but on 7, I thought (since this was how they did it in the book) that we weren't supposed to round. I actually did the problem with rounding at first, and I got it right. I just changed my answer after doing some practice problems from the book that told me not to round. #8 I legitimately got wrong, but I was confused about it, so I'm not surprised.

Still, this is all really really annoying, and contributing to my hatred of the class. It also doesn't give me a heck of a lot of confidence for the final, because OF COURSE it will be the same format.

For those of you who are worried about med school, I can assure you that NOTHING in med school was as arbitrary and stupid as the way this class is scored. Seriously. It kind of makes me want to not study since I know that all I have to do to fail the final is write down a 7.3 on the first step and see a 7.5 when I plug the numbers into my calculator. The error will just carry through and I will get everything wrong. At least in med school, exams are basically all multiple choice and if you f-ed up one question it had no bearing on the next.

Fortunately I am carrying an A- for the first 1/2 of the course. I just have to keep my total at a B or above (a B- is an F in grad school). That would result in a bunch of unpleasantness that I don't want to get into.

Side note: I just figured out that if I get a C+ in this class (bottom 5%), then I will get a B overall. I actually had to think for a moment about what a C+ was on a numeric scale, since I've never gotten one of those before. So... C+ = 2.3, A- = 3.7, 2.3+3.7 = 6, 6/2 = 3, 3 = B. So unless I get less than 40% on the final -- like FAIL it for real, I should be ok.

Woo?

The kicker is this class has absolutely no bearing on what I'm doing for my PhD. None. It has been a total waste of my time.

So, now you all know what I will be doing for the next 5 days.