The Geekess

Someone on pdx_edu posted about an interesting professor ranking site. It shows the average GPA and dropout rates for a given class or professor at a university. The only catch is you have to sign up to see the ratings. I gave them my spam email address and took a look. I think it's accurate because I checked on a professor I know who gives mostly A's, and his GPA breakdown was close to what I expected. Apparently they get the info from the university, so I trust it more than sites that rely on student rankings.

Looking at my statistics class, there seems to be a large number of C's, a smaller number of B's, and an even smaller number of A's. It looks pretty normally distributed. I was reassured that there were few D's or F's, but I'm not sure what grade I'm going to get in the class. I'm studying my butt off today for my midterm tomorrow. It's no fun. :(

However, the sun is shining outside my windows and I have good music to listen to while I study, so it's not that bad.

I got a 12 out of 23 on my Statistics midterm. I'm not happy about it. The test was multiple choice, with no partical credit, and 8 of the questions depended on getting one question right. I didn't get that question right, and I missed two other questions, which leaves me with a 52% on the thing. I'm mad because the test results don't reflect all the knowledge I've gained in this class. I didn't read one question correctly, and even though I went through the correct motions for the other 8 problems, I got nothing for it. The midterm was worth "about" 25% of our grade, which puts me down to a B automatically.

Multiple choice tests in a 400 level math class is just lame. Most math professors give partial credit because they know that students make simple mistakes and those don't have anything to do with whether you know the material. I think the reason the teacher gave us a multiple choice test is because he's lazy. He never grades our homework, he just gives it back with a check mark on it. It's basically an attendance check. The class average for the test was 15.23, which has got to say something about the test and/or the professor.

My scholarships require that I be full-time. I'm at 12 credits now, so I can't just drop the class. I also can't take it pass/no pass because of a college of engineering rule that all core classes have to be graded. I have two options for what to do about this:

1. I could stick out the class and hope I get at least a C in it. I'm not very happy about that option, since I was hoping to have good grades my senior year.
2. I could audit the class. I'm not sure if an audited class counts towards my 12 credit requirement for my scholarships though.

I talked to the scholarship coordinator, and audited classes don't count towards my full-time status. Looks like I'm just going to have to eat the grade. Unless I fail the class on purpose so I can repeat it. I'm not sure how that would affect my scholarships, and it's probably not a good idea anyway.