October 13, 2005 :: Inscrutable math

I got my accounting exam back. And I'm even more confused now than I was when I took the exam. You see, the professor gave me a 50. Out of 50. I had to look again at the inside cover at his chickenscratch to see if that was really a 5 and a 0. Even though he marked up clearly in red pen where I had gone astray inside (and I had gone astray in several places), he gave me a 50 anyway.

So once that sank in, I decided that he must have been fairly lenient when grading. Maybe my expectations of his expectations were overestimated. Maybe I just set high standards for myself.

One of my classmates was having trouble finding his score, since the professor had chosen to write them in an odd place. He opened his book and said "is this it, here?" and pointed to it. 35. 35! And he actually WORKS in finance, and has taken accounting classes before. I almost wish I hadn't seen it. But then, it made it clear the professor wasn't all THAT lenient. So then I figure, maybe he just marked up arithmetic errors but gave credit for setting things up properly, even if the math was wrong.

Then, just like I was back in undergrad, people started asking "so what'd you get? How'd you do?" I didn't like sharing my scores then, and I don't like it now. I said "I did ok" and left it at that.

posted by Rainmayun at 10:17 AM -