test anxiety

Somewhere over the course of my one week away from classes I seemingly forgot than the mid term examinations I took just prior to spring break would actually later yield tangible grades.

So at the end of psych class today when Dr. Schiff began pontificating in painful detail about how disappointed he was in out class results, memories of sweating bullets over a number two pencil in that same classroom two weeks prior were suddenly brought to my attention.

For at least five minutes he went on-and-on-and-on about how he had recalculated his grading system three different times to try and find a way to accurately grade the tests without failing half the class. As I'm sure you can imagine, the rows of wide-eyed and worried students were not watching his dissection of the bell curve, nor listening to his explanation of the formula he used to calculate our scores. No, I believe that most of the students were thinking something along the lines , "STOP WITH THE MATH ALREADY YOU MAD MAN AND TELL ME MY DAMN TEST SCORE!!!"

Without too much further ado he handed back out exams, laying the thick packets face down on our desks one at a time. It was like watching the hand of death arbitrarily select her victims. Some students would flip the exam over hastily and then have two dreadfully low numbers knock the wind out of their chest in one, audible gasp. Others might sneakily peak at a nervously lifted corner before collapsing slightly in their chairs - from relief? Or from misery? No one knows.

Schiff handed my exam to me, and in typical "Mo-style" I flashed him a pleasant smile and cooed a cheesy "thank you." No matter my fate, I was sure to bear any burden with both grace and dignity. Glancing at the equation scratched in red pencil at the top of my exam, I suddenly felt the razor sharp edge of self-loathing carve "64" in my heart. Damn. I really, really, really studied for this one. How could that happed? I am not a "D" student!

Thankfully, it wasn’t more than a few panicked moments before I realized that these were just components of a more elaborate equation. Add the six, subtract the for, divide by eighty-five and few other careful calculations... and my score was… 91/100! That's an A-! Yeah! I filed the paper away into my notebook, then actually dug it back out a few moments later to look at it with my own eyes once again, to be sure that I wasn't just delusional and trying to appease myself.

From my rude and curious glances around the room I gather that I actually had one of the best scores in the class. (Whew!) Now if I can just buckle down and knock out a senior thesis... I might just graduate in six weeks.