Physics Finals Rant

I just finished my physics final about 20 minutes ago. Yes, I decided to blog to help me relax my sore brain and perhaps to ponder my fate based on one exam.

Was I prepared for this stupid final? Yes and no. Yes, I did go to the review session last saturday morning (which, by the way, sucked- I came straight from work. That meant staying awake for about 26 hrs...straight), I did the practice problems, did the extra credit problems, and have skimmed through the chapter summaries. I also had a good amount of sleep despite the choppy pattern. Now, no- because I did not go through all the multiple choice problems in the textbook (tell me, is it humanly possible to correctly answer 10-12 problems x 14 chapters?). Now why make a big deal out of the multiple choice questions? Our exam, well most of the content, came STRAIGHT out of those MCQ's. God damn it. The simplest realization, or better put, just paying attention to this ever-present theme in our class never occured to me.

Shit. Is there something wrong with me? Should I rethink my philosophy of work? Now I am really confused. Maybe I should try the "work smarter" school of thought. Maybe not because it may totally change my time-tested ethic of hardcore suicidal work. I don't know.

So our exam was divided in two parts- you work on your own for the first part (a long problem, a bunch of MCQ's, some free-body diagrams, and conceptual questions), and you get in groups after an hour and ten minutes. As always, I only wanted the first part. I DESPISE GROUP WORK (btw, it's different from true teamwork). A felt good while working on my exam, uttering "BAM!!!" to myself after every correct answer. There were some informed guesses too, and the occassional hail mary shots. Then came the group thing- everyone can share answers and "work" together on the same MCQ's for the second time. The 2nd part was worth 25%. I benefited from the second part because it just confirmed my answers and it shed light on my hail marys.

I didn't get one problem, I think it was about radiation heat transfer and thermal conduction. I asked the girl who sat behind me and she gave me her answer. I wanted an explanation for such since I couldn't figure it out. I got a really cocky reply: "I don't do the work. I just know the answers". I said "How is that possible?" when I actually meant " Why don't you go fuck yourself?". She, and the other two girls in our group answered almost in unison: "Oh we memorized it from the textbook".

GODDAMIT they just memorized the fucking letter answers at the back of the textbook!

Who's smarter now, huh?

The whole thing infuriated me for myriad reasons. One, I never thought about it. Two, I was keen on doing the problems more. Three, I could go on forever with a bunch of excuses but whatever. Bottomline- I will suck on this exam and they will get really high marks because they decided to not study the material and I decided to kill myself learning physics. They will get A's for not knowing physics, and I might get a B for working my ass off.

No good deed remains unpunished.