Have you ever been slapped by a random stranger, who immediately ran away after the assault, leaving you with a painful searing sting not only on your physical being, but also in your inner-core being? You're left feeling like: "WTF?! Who would do that to me? What did I do to deserve such uncouth malice?" This was the general feeling that invaded my soul as I left the lecture hall after turning in my first real exam of my graduate school career, like I was just slapped in the face by this test.
The lead professor began by saying that the test was unusually long, there were no "trick" questions, and there was a 3-hour limit. Fine. Deep breath. I'll be okay. I studied hard all week long. I drew diagrams and know the processes/mechanisms. I made sure to to study mutations that can perturb the normalcy of the system, because I predicted that since the course is Molecular Biology and Genomics, the cell and its perturbations will come up at some point. I practiced with previous years' exams. I was prepared. Even before going into the exam, I was trying to calm a fellow classmate. "You'll be fine," I told her. "We can't know everything, but we know enough." I had no intention of lying to her (or to myself), but in the end, I did tell lies, because when the 3-hour limit was up, not only did I not know "enough," I was not "fine."
My calm and collected self wilted into a heap of shakiness and nausea. The exam was 18 pages long, all short answers, all required multiple steps of thinking to arrive at the answer. That is, if you understood the question to begin with. On my first pass, I could answered maybe three questions at most. I kept cycling through the exam, each time hoping that some new information would surface into my brain and help me arrive at an answer - ANY answer. No such luck. At the 2-hour mark, panic set in. No longer did I care if the answer I put down was the right one, I just wrote words. And yet, for some questions, even that criteria was too high - I had no idea what words can be put down. I have never not finished a test before, until today.
It is true that afterwards, my classmates reconvened and it seemed that my reaction was shared amongst everyone else, i.e. we all felt like the exam was on crack hooked on morphine. A lot of people also admitted to not finishing the test. Everyone felt it was way too extensive to be finished in three hours. Practice tests were moot, as our test bore no resemblance to any previous tests. Perhaps they (the group of professors for this course) thought that since we had done so much better than previous years on Problem Sets (i.e. homework) that the test would need to be scaled up in difficulty to match our abilities? Or more cynically, they all went on a manic rampage with an evil desire to feel our pain of being bitched-slapped?
Whatever the cause may be, I can't erase this feeling of inadequacy. It is one story to tell if you didn't study and failed, and it is entirely a different novel when you studied (hard) and failed. For the former, you failed because you didn't study. In the latter, you studied and still failed... so where does that leave me? The test won't be handed back for at least another week, and it will be graded on a curve... so I have a whole week to ponder the misery of retaking this course again next year.
What a way to end the first real course with a bang. Bang.
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