Jurph, I think the issue is whether you’re talking about a bell curve, or a “gimme points” curve. You’re talking about gimme-points curves, and Trunk is talking about a bell curve. In essence, you’re both right and you’re both wrong. Some people losing points is inherent in grading on a bell curve, and people losing points is unheard-of in a gimme-point curve. We used to have this discussion a lot in high school chemistry. People would be pissing and moaning about their grades and ask for a curve, and Artie would say he’d be glad to do it. 'Course, some folks were gonna wind up with D’s and F’s, but…after the howls of protest had crested, he’d offer the second option, which was giving us points.
You’d think after the second or third test, people would stop asking about a curve and just ask the man how many extra points we were getting. You’d think so, but you’d be wrong.
I always liked the way the campus felt during finals week; it was energized for several days unlike any other time during the school year, except maybe the beginning and ending of the year. I much preferred writing term papers to sitting an exam, as one has much more control over writing a paper than answering questions that appear at the instructor’s whim.
Sorry, I disagree. I have several Lit courses this semester, and it really varies according to the material. Even among literature classes, the difficulty of finals can very. Maybe you can operate like some mindless machine no matter the material, but I can’t. If I can’t get into the subject matter, my grade suffers, no matter how hard I work at it. Fortunately this is the last semester of college, so I won’t have to spend any more time fretting about it
I have three literature courses this semester. North American Italian Lit, Brit Lit I, and Brit Lit III (The Romantics, Wee!). All the courses have wildly different things to read, they all have wildly different themes, and they all covered a lot of ground…1-2 new authors and with 3-4 pieces of literature/author per week for each class.
But analysis is analysis. If you can analyze a novel in Italian Lit, you can analyze a poem in Brit Lit. If you can pick out the themes in King Lear, you should be able to pick out the themes in Christabel as well. It’s the same basic set of tools, just applied differently. I just can’t imagine cramming for a literature final. You either know the material or you don’t…and if you don’t, reading the book again or recopying notes or buying the Cliff Notes is not going to help in any substantial way.
pepperland girl, maybe your English classes are different from the ones I took, but we didn’t get to bring the books we were analyzing into the exam. Which meant we needed to know the themes and historical background discussed in class COLD, so we could even begin to analyze.
But yes, I study History, Classics and Biology, and I’ve never had an exam that didn’t need serious preparation.
None of my professors allow open-book exams. And the nice professor who used to give us the questions a week in advance is on sabbatical right now.
Here is what I am saying–reading the books and attending the lectures are all the preperation I need, and that’s always served me well, so I do not understand why people freak out and cram for finals that are based on nothing more than analysis.
This semester I made it abundantly clear that I would not accept anything during finals week except finals…No late work, no research papers, etc. which should have been turned in already.
So it’s not going to be so bad. Blue book essays don’t take that long to go through when I have concentrated time and can focus on them exclusively. I just need to get the grades in by the following week.
I loathe finals. I have test anxiety (I’m trying to work through that; I’ve been seeing a school counselor) and I freak out. I get anxious and sick before tests and exams, even when I am confident about knowing the material. I had two finals today and I’m exhausted. I am very hard on myself; that is a big part of the problem. I have been disappointed with 99/100. I wish I could be more accepting of the fact that I am not perfect and I cannot know/remember everything. The finals themselves aren’t too bad, but the time leading up to them is torture for me. No matter how much I study I always feel I should have studied more.
