…Are over!High-Fives all around!
*SLAP*
Ahem. This time around was about as harrowing and hectic as I’ve come to expect from test time at this place. As is at this point distressingly typical for me, I go in feeling woefully unprepared and go out feeling like, hey, I actually retained more from half-sleeping through that lecture then I thought I had!
(And for the benefit of any concerned relatives reading this, I assure you I’m joking about the sleeping part.)
So anyway, this time around I had 3 midterms, the last of which was on the First of March. I can confidently say that this is the least number of Midterms I’ve ever had at BCIT. I don’t remember how many I had in my first Semester, but the second had around 5. And as for the 3rd term? All but 1 course had a Midterm, creating such a clusterflux of midterms of due assignments that it made a whole month of my life a blurry hell that to this day I’m not certain I actually escaped. It is, after all, as the old CST saying goes: The worst Semester is the 3rd.
This Semester though? 3 Midterms over 2 weeks – 9 days. The first was on the 21st of February, the second the very next day on the 22nd, and as already stated the third was a week after that. Really, much more civil then the, ahem, experience of the previous semester, but not without their own share of gripes. So without further ado…
Midterm #1 – OS
Leaving out the rant about this class in general (which I’m pretty sure I could get away with as I seriously doubt that instructor will ever read this), this Midterm was sort of BS. It, worth 35% of my final grade, had 20 1-mark multiple choice questions and that’s it. “Why are you complaining!?” Some of you may exclaim. “That sounds super easy!”. Because, my answer would be, there’s easy and there there’s negligent. 1 Question on this test was worth MORE than 1 percent of my final grade. In other words, one bad guess or misinterpreted question would result in me losing more than 1 percent of my final grade.
And there were misinterpretations. It was full of typos, had clearly been written the night before and had had 2 questions straight ripped out of the key, meaning that by the time we got our mark it was actually out of only EIGHTEEN questions! But here’s the best part. 18 multiple choice questions, a class of over 60 students, and not a single one got 100 percent. The highest mark was 16/18 and with a class average of ~60%, you can bet not too many people were lucky enough to be in the 16/18 range!
Midterm #2 – BLAW
I actually have no real complains about this one. it was a good size with plenty of time, and I honestly surprised myself with how much material I had retained from class.
Midterm #3 – Graphics
Content-wise this one wasn’t actually too bad. It was difficult, but it’s difficult subject matter, and ultimately it did what it should have done in that it tested your knowledge of the subject matter. Where it did have problems was on time. As far as I know not a single person finished this one completely. It was about 10% too long for the time allotted. Still, time aside, not a bad test. And despite having not completed it myself I ended up doing pretty well (pro tip: It seriously pays to budget your time such that you’re saving more time consuming questions for last).