freak occurrence

So...

I'm taking this class. (ok, I'm taking 4 classes, but...) This class for which I never, ever, ever go to lecture. Any family please ignore that last sentence. For family, never ever ever means always, faithfully, even when I don't *have* class.

So anyway, yeah, I don't go. And since the first week, I haven't read the book. And I'm not sure I even read it then.

Had the mid-term this week. 75 multi-choice questions. P-sychology. In order to prepare, I read my e-mail, goofed off online, read the fake doctor, and read thru (and by reading I actually mean scanned while flipping thru other things) the powerpoints.

I probably spent all of 45 minutes preparing for it. Maybe. Perhaps.

I got 61/75. That's an 81.something%!

That's me an 15 other people over 80%. What the Fuck? The test wasn't that tough. I finished in less than 30 minutes. How totally braindead (sorry to anyone who failed the test who's reading this) do you honestly have to be to fail an intro, survey, *p-sychology* test? it's not even like it was short answer!

non-representative fake-question example-
Q. The human brain:
a. is a basketball
b. has a fore, mid, and hind brain
c. eats monkeys
d. is made of cheese

Now, using this non-representative fake-question, I will teach you all how to take a multi-choice test.

First, one answer will be total BS. In this case, it's answer a. (no arguments, people) It's obvious that for peoples brains to actually be basketballs, their skulls would have to be much, much larger.

Then one will look possible, which is answer d (and quite probable in many people), but it's still not the "real" answer.

Then you get two, which both look soooo right- b and c in this case. And this is where it gets tricky. Usually your choices will look more like "b. does eat monkeys, c. does not eat monkeys" and then you're really screwed.

but since this is a p-sychology class, we know the answer won't be the biology one, so it's obviously not answer B. Or is it. Um... at this point I suggest small change. Nickels or ten cent (or whatever) pieces. Heads is b, tails is C.

And my half dollar says the answer is C. The human brain eats monkeys.

Note, I don't actually take tests like this- the other students get really pissed off when you're flipping a coin every 20 seconds. Guess it's distracting. And I'm too young to die.

Still, freaking 81%? WTF were they thinking?

Oh, and for those of you wondering, the mean was 49.3 (67.1%) and the standard dev was 10.6 (14.5%). Freaks.

Oh, for anyone really scared (or scarred), with my total BS lab report that puts my total grade atm at 74.8%.
And all I had to do was show up.

it's times like this that I really gotta wonder about the value of putting in even an extra hour a week (giving me an average of 1 hour 10 minutes a week spent on this paper outside class). Would an extra hour or two of studying really have helped me out that much, or would it just have made me paranoid, or wasted time. Ah well.

j.