I’ve discussed all of my classes except the last one: Astronomy. And I can discuss it now because it turns out that my exam in that class is today! I thought it was next week, but it is actually today. Am I worried because I have a week less study time than I thought? Nope. Why? Because this exam, unlike certain others, is open book. I had planned on rewatching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos this weekend to freshen my mind, but even without that I think I’ll do alright.

In spite of my hatred of doing mathematics, I took the Astronomy class because I know I need a science class for my degree. I have since realized that my History class would probably have counted toward that, but whatever, I didn’t have people talking me through it when I chose my classes, though I clearly should have. Anyway, I don’t regret taking the class. The math involved is pretty basic and only comes up occasionally. Test questions are mostly multiple choice, the professor is quite good, I have a genuine interest in the material. All in all, I’d see myself going into a second year Astronomy class before I continued with History. (Though, in fact, I’ll probably do neither)

We’ve had two tests in class, closed book, and I’ve averaged about 75% on those, I think. Take home assignments, more math heavy, but open book, I’ve had an average of around 90%. This exam is apparently a combination of the two styles, so I’m pretty confident going into this that I’ll do fine.

Post Exam Update: Okay, that was more like it. I feel reasonably confident that I’m in the 75 to 85% on that exam. It was largely multiple choice questions and I used my book to look up even those I thought I knew already. While I probably did still get a few wrong, I suspect I did well. There was also the mathematical question that I wrestled with for almost an hour. I probably messed that one up, but I’m bound to get a few points for trying. And anyway, while the troublesome question on yesterday’s exam was worth half the grade, this troublesome question was equal to all the other thirty questions. I don’t feel like it was too bad.

One peril of open book tests I noticed, though, was that I occasionally became distracted when I found something interesting in the book that was unrelated to the exam. Of all the textbooks I had to buy for this schoolin’, the Astronomy one is the easiest to enjoy flipping through, I think.

Tonight I will be writing my history exam. I suspect that this will be the hardest thing I’ve had to do for school this year.

My history class is already the class I have the most difficulty with. I don’t like writing the essays in any class, but here my apathy is at its strongest. I am interested in the material, but more in the sense of “I like to hear about history” than “I like to do research about history and then write about it”. Going to the lectures in this class is like watching a documentary, and that’s cool. If documentaries started asking me to participate, I would not watch them.

And to make matters worse, this is a closed book exam. I’m supposed to just remember everything we’ve learned in the last few months. That is, of course, ridiculous. I don’t plan to be a historian, but if I did what kind of training would this be? Surely it would be frowned upon for anyone who wrote academic papers without checking up on the facts as they did so, so why are we training future historians to do anything but diligently keep checking? If we reward the students who go off their memory, we’re just going to get people who think they know enough that they needn’t look things up. This should be the opposite of what we want. But more importantly, it is hard for me.

Ugh. Anyway, I like the class. I feel like I’m learning. And I’ve done alright on everything else so far. But this exam is tonight and it is worth 40% of my mark for the term and I don’t like it.

Post Exam Update: Okay, so I’ve just written it and it went about how I expected. There were two parts to the thing, each worth 50% of the mark. First we had a list of terms and we had to pick thirty of them and define them. I had no problem with this. I’ll be conservative and say I got about 40% on this section, right?

Secondly there was the essay part of the exam. The other 50% of my mark all rests on one essay. That’s twenty percent of my whole mark for the term in this class. Well, I wrote an essay. Even though I am, as I said above, against doing this sort of thing from memory, and even though I have taken another class that exists solely to remind us things like “handing in a first draft of an essay is a bad idea”, I wrote an essay. It was not a good essay. I’d go so far as to say it was a bad essay. Heck, I’d even go so far as to say it wasn’t so much an exam as it was a list of things I know that are somewhat related to the topic put into paragraph form. It wasn’t good. Here’s what I figure, though: Even this sorry excuse of an essay probably won’t get ZERO points, so, as long as someone is generous enough to give it a few points, I could get over the 50% mark on this exam after all.

Anyway, I know I’m doing alright on all the non-exam parts of this class. On everything else, the 60% of the term mark, I’d say I’m close to 50%. A few more points from the exam is fine by me.

This week, it’s just the Phone Guys. Here they are: