I found out my grade on my Microbiology exam yesterday. I look at the sheet and it says 73%. I was not happy. Then I am reading through the Scantron and I see that two of the answers that I marked correctly were graded as being wrong by the Scantron machine (it writes the correct answers next to the ones you got wrong so you can check its work). Apparantly I did not erase well enough for it to distinguish my correct answers from my original wrong ones. Well that's good, my grades goes up about 2.8%, so I am now at a 76%, rounding the decimal. I am still not happy. I studied pretty well for this exam, I read the book and I read the notes.

As I am looking over my answer sheet and comparing to the exam, there is quite a bit of commotion going on in the classroom as teacher is distributing exams. She begins the exam debriefing, as always occurs in situations such as this. She begins by stating that the average score on this exam was a 55%. In other words, approximately half of the class knew half of the material covered in the three chapters we were tested on. I start to feel not so bad about my own exam score. Because of the tremendously low scores teacher decides taht everybody is getting an additional 10% to their exam scores. Again, my day is looking up as I am at an 86%. In addition to that, teacher reminds us that during the last lab period, she allowed us all to perform a practical extra credit assignment by performing the Gram's stain and identify the bacteria in an unknown culture by positive or negative for the stain and shape. Not too difficult a procedure, so I picked up an extra 5 points on wednesday. My final grade for the exam: 91%. This is definitely not my finest hour as I could have probably scored much higher, but I am definitely pleased by the result. There are some students who are not so much. These are primarily the pre-nurses. I can tell that they are because teacher has us identify our major at the beginning of the course and most of the pre-nurses are seated near each other. The first complaint to be expressed is the lack of a curve. Apparantly, they do not realize that adding extra points to everybody's exam is a curve, teacher just did not call it that.

The next idiotic complaint to be registered is the fact that teacher is testing on so many topics at one time. Teacher explains that she talked to the previous instructor, either the cow or the instructor that I had for my May term Immunology class, and the previous instructor told her that students used to be quized every week, which sounds like something the cow would do, and the scores were incredibly low on these quizes, which is why teacher decided to not continue to quiz each week. Personally, I would prefer a quiz each week, we did that in Immunology and in Genetics, and I think that I received a better grade in both classes because there was limited material to remember for each testing period. But, I digress. Overall, the class would probably score worse on weekly quizes than on the three chapter exams we currently have. They also do not realize that were they to have the cow as an instructor, instead of getting structured notes, they would be writing from the minute they step into the class until the minute they leave. That is how Genetics worked. There was but brief periods where one could put their pen down. Teacher just put a transparency on the overhead and talked and talked and talked. She knew her material, she taught the same classes for like 30 years already. On the exams, all essays, and lots of information was required to show that you had an adequate amount of knowledge about the concept. New micro teacher uses structured notes that came with the book and just reads from them. I think that this has turned the class lazy, or lazier than normal at least. They think that just because they do not have to write anything, the class will be simple, or that because the tests are all scantron, the exams will be easy. Unfortunately for them, that is not so. Having an all multiple choice exam makes the test more difficult because if one does not know part of the concept, the entire question is wrong. With an essay exam, one can have some knowledge, if not all of it, and still receive partial credit.

Some of the pre-nurses started thinking about complaining to the division head. I started thinking: what are you morons going to complain about? The fact that you do not study and get a really bad grade? They have no room for complaint, every question on the exam came directly from the text. Now, to be honest, Teacher does suck. She shows little working knowledge of the subject matter, merely reading from the PowerPoint presentations that came with the book. But just because she is incompetent, does not mean all of the students have to be. One of these days, they will learn that. Until then, I am stuck in hell with these fucking pre-nurses.