Last week, we were given this reading assignment for homework in AP world. It was this packet about Harappa. That's it, a reading assignment? Wow, what an easy piece of homework! So I finished reading it the very first night it was assigned, and that was that. Well, until the next class, that was. All of the sudden, Mr. A gave us a pop quiz on the assignment. I, having breezed through it like three nights ago, barely remembered any of the content. There were seven questions on the quiz. Guess how many questions I actually answered? Uh, zero. That must've done wonders for my grade.
Fast forward a few days. "Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Next class we're having a test on India. Study the material on this sheet. Okay, have a nice lunch." Mr. A passed us a list of terms and things we needed to memorized, and then we were dismissed. I did not want to get a zero like I did on that quiz, so over the next few days I crammed like heck. I wrote myself a study guide based on the list of content he had handed us, and I memorized everything I had written. I studied it at home, in advisement, during math, when I arrived in class on the day of the test... I thought I was going to do great. I was sure I knew everything he could possibly throw at us.
The test was being passed out, and I was sure I was ready. When we received the test booklets, the first thing that went through my head was, Oh crap. I flipped through it, scanning through all the questions, and it turned out three quarters of it were completely unrelated to the stuff the guide told us to know. I mean, this test was about ancient/classical India. There were questions in there about these rivers in China and the writing system used in Mesopotamia. And the questions that did involve India were based on very small details the study guide never touched upon. I began to feel sick. This was an AP class, and I wanted to look good. I got a 90 on my geography test, I completely failed that quiz, and I still haven't heard back about my essay. This test would drag down my grade even more, and it would hurt.
Mr. A sort of has this unique way of grading things. He keeps score of the number of questions everyone missed, and then finds the average and median of these numbers. Our grades are based off of how we did compared to everyone else, rather than how many we got right and wrong. So, if most of the class did really bad and you did okay, you'd get a good grade.
The next class, Mr. A told us that the average number of questions missed was twelve. The median was around there, too. He said a lot of people missed around twenty, but no one missed thirty or more. I knew I was going to be one of those people. When our tests were handed back, I anticipated the worst. I expected to see a big fat -23 or something on the top of my test. But when my test got back to me, I was shocked to find that I had only missed six! I have no idea how it happened, but I was so surprised and relieved. I can't remember what most of my friends got, but I know they all missed more than me. I think Michelle got nineteen wrong. Mr. A then reviewed all the questions on the test, and he admitted that he probably made a few mistakes while correcting. Yeah, he definitely did. In the end, I had a -3! I'm not sure what grade that equates to, because Mr. A hasn't updated the grades website in forever. It's probably a very decent grade, though.