Finals Week

So finals week ended today, and I have to say I am pretty relieved.  I took some challenging classes this semester, and am looking forward to a three week Christmas vacation.

I usually don't gloat about my grades, (mainly because I don't ever have anything impressive to gloat about) but I will say that I exceeded my own expectations this semester.  I can only attribute it to being married.  I had six finals, and got A's on four of them.  The other two....? No, but seriously...4 out of 6?  That is fantastic!

So two of mine were scheduled to be taken in class.  I never like scheduled finals.  It is always way too crammed in the lecture hall, and everyone is taking the same test, making it hard not to feel like the professor thinks you are cheating even if your eyes haven't left your paper.

Wednesday morning I had a scheduled final at 7:00 AM.  Another reason scheduled finals are lame...that is not the ideal time for me to prove my knowledge of anything, let alone Organic Chemistry.  So I walk in and find a seat between two girls and the tests are distributed.  I picked a great seat that morning, because some really funny things started happening around me.

I realized that I had sat down between two girls on complete opposite ends of the Chemistry spectrum.  We were all given some scratch paper with our test, and as the test got under way, with each question, the girl on my left furiously scribbled things down, as if all of that extra work on the scratch paper was necessary.  She was filling up the front and back of all three sheets of paper she had.  Halfway through the test I had filled up maybe half a sheet.  Was I missing something?  I was getting answers to everything without copious amounts of extra work, but I felt like doing some long division on my scratch paper just so she wouldn't glance over and judge me for my lack of effort.  She was a super-student.

Now the girl on my right.  I wish I was making this up.  Literally this poor girl got her test, flipped through the pages, set the test back down on her desk, and waited.  She waited about and hour and forty five minutes.  She didn't write anything.  She didn't look at any of the test again.  She just sat there, and then went to turn it in when a respectable amount of people had already turned their tests in.  I felt so bad.  What kind of low could she have hit that she literally didn't even attempt to answer ANYTHING?  Was all hope lost?  IS THERE NO BALM IN GILEAD?  And what is worse is that she had to sit for almost two hours to avoid the embarrassment of turning it in before the people who actually took the test.  Not a super-student.

So I was sitting in between these two extremes.  Another thing that stressed me out is that out of sheer curiosity of these two girls and their test taking habits, or lack thereof, I kept glancing at their papers, but never actually looking at their answers.  The girl on my right didn't have any, anyway.  The stress came from my professor, every two minutes, shouting out to everyone, "EYES ON YOUR OWN PAPER!"  I don't think he was ever talking to me, because he was always looking somewhere else when he was saying it, but it still was nerve-racking.  At one point he even started shouting, "Excuse me, young man in the hat!  Yes you!  Please turn your hat backwards, I can't see your eyes!"

This post has become much longer than I anticipated, but all of these things made me laugh in my head, and they are all true.  Last story.  When I am about a fourth of the way through the test, I look up and notice a boy heading to the front with his test.  I thought maybe he had to go to the bathroom, but no.  He was done, and he was turning in his test.  We had only been going about 40 minutes.  The next person to turn their test in was after like an hour and a half.  As in fifty minutes after that first guy.  We all know that the guy who turned his test in first is either a chemistry prodigy, or he completely bombed that test.  There is no middle ground.  There is no way that he is just an average student that got done really quick.  Maybe he was like the girl on my right that didn't answer anything, but didn't feel it was worth his time to sit and wait for others to finish.  Then again, maybe he was a freaky genius that knew every answer without having to use any scratch paper.

I learned in that two hours that I am probably right in the middle of all those extremes.  I have no problem with that.