Calculations
Terrible, terrible exam. Horrendous. Abysmal. Dire. Grim. Tragic. Insert other synonyms of "absolute shit".
Well actually, if I were to disregard the last, oh, 13 marks of the paper, I might have said the rest of it went rather well. It's hard to disregard 13 marks that you've completely lost, though.
Bloody market failure questions. And bloody TIMED ESSAY WRITING.
Anyway, I have a Gripe. Standard A-level practice is that there is really no set boundary for an "A"-grade student. If you had a radically amazing genius-level group of students in one year, there would still only be an arbitrary maximum of 15-20% A's. Maybe even less. Even if 45% of them would have gotten an A grade in any other year. Now, surely an A-grade student isn't RELATIVE to the students around him/her. If you are a capable student who achieves the high standards set by an exam paper, why should you be deprived of an A just because lots of other people also meet these standards? It doesn't make you any less capable. The question is whether or not you can do the paper, not whether or not everyone else did the paper better than you did. It's not about the damn bell curves and standard distribution. If an inordinate amount of students do well on an exam paper, that should reflect on the exam paper, not the students! And equally, if an inordinate amount of students do badly on an exam paper, that just shows that the exam board is incapable of maintaining a similar standard of exam papers between successive examination years.
Grade inflation...pah.
Of course you must realize that I am only being bitter about this because of how badly my exam went. Ulterior motives, and all that. Hopefully some Cambridge Examination Officer will stumble upon this rant and take pity on my deeply distressed being.
I was just calculating...13% of my A2 economics paper is 6.5% out of my total grade (last year's AS and today's A2 combined, with 50% weighting each). I got an A for my AS, and I have no idea if this is a high A or a low A. Let's say a low A. Let's say I scraped an A and got 70%. That's 35% for the final weighted AS+A2 total. Now, in order to get an A for A2, I would need to get a weighted 35%, or 70% for A2 economics. We've already established that I've lost 13%, which leaves me a leeway of 17%...17 more marks to lose.....???
Hmm. That was more than I expected. I think my math is wrong.
Hmm. I don't think it's wrong. But, hmm. 17 marks...someone might want to check that for me. Any math geniuses amongst the lot of you? Probably not. Let's work with that anyway. Let's say I lose a maximum of...5 marks for my development essay. And maybe 2 marks for data response. That means...I can lose 10 marks for Multiple Choice on Friday and still get an A...???
This can't be right. And it was assuming I only just scraped an A for AS, too. I must be doing the math wrong. My brain is obviously fried after two hours and fifteen minutes of continuous nonstop writing. I will try again tomorrow.
I also hate math.
In other news, I watched Finding Nemo today :D It ROCKS.
In other other news, I have also (on the request of some unknown individual) joined (or rather, been joined to) RiceBowlJournals.com. I am AZN. Yay me. PS: To this unknown individual who submitted my details, I would actually like to know who you are, if you don't mind :)