My foray into grad school was going well. A's on both of my assignments for the first class, but in UK speak an A is anything over a 70%. With an over 70% average if I kept it up I'd be able to graduate with distinction, which all of a sudden became very important.
Onto the second class... 73% on the first grade. Excellent. But this course wasn't split 50/50, no it's 30/70 and that 73% was the 30% grade.
Then disaster struck, just on the end of that first assignment. Our home internet was down for more than two weeks and I had to drive 30 minutes into town to get work done. We got our new dish and faster internet and then I couldn't access the library. Hard to get a paper done when you can't research. Two weeks of no library access until we discovered a work around. At this point the paper was due in a matter of days... I got a two week extension, pushing my due date to when I was going to be in St Johns. Which really meant I had a week and a half to get research done, paper written and pack for St Johns and leave.
My paper was a piece of crap, I knew this, but I didn't have time to fix it.
40%. D.
Okay, the grade is fair, I can't argue, but oh how I wish it hadn't been as crappy as I was pretty sure it was. However, grades that low? They don't necessarily let you proceed on to the next stage. If you get below a 40 they don't let you go on to the next stage of the program. Fortunately, my average for that class is like 49.9. As far as I can read in the student handbook I'm definitely okay to continue on, but I need to have over a 50% in half the classes for them to allow me to do a thesis. The biggest unfortunate, is that our grades are provisional until the Exam Board reviews them in August. If they read that paper and decide it deserves an even lower grade I am screwed.
The only plus is that now there is no way I can graduate with distinction, so all that pressure has been taken off.
No comments:
Post a Comment