From Agony to Jubilant

You can experience this two extreme emotions in just a matter of minutes. All you need is a evil, melodramatic teacher who loves manipulating and toying your feelings. And those who has been following my blog closely would have easily guess who he is. Of course, he's none other than my business law lecturer.

Today was the day of verdict for our mid term. Just as everybody was waiting anxiously for our paper, he started off his class in an unusual manner. "Honestly, I really love to give everybody an A for this class. You guys are a bunch of excellent students, but unfortunately, the school doesn't allow me to do this and I am sad to say most of you guys did badly." Everybody held their breadth by his sudden niceness and reveal of the truth. "Well, it's time to face the reality, no point crying over split milk, children."

Some background information. As the mid term was base on spotting and analyzing issues found in a single case study, he didn't mention anything about the total score for that paper before or during the mid term but merely state each issue correctly spotted and analyzed is worth 10 points and we are supposed to spot as many issues as we can. I just thought this was crap as how are we supposed to know how many issues to spot since there's no total score, so basically we just scrutinize for whatever issues we can find since we have no idea of the maximum number and pray that it's enough. So, when I got back my score and saw 117, I have absolutely no idea how I fared.

Only after he distributed the paper to everyone did he say there's 20 issues in total
and the total score is 200. Oh my god. I merely just passed? How can anybody pull off all the 20 issues in that case study. He starting writing out the grading for the different category of scores on the whiteboard. A >160, B 140-160, C 120 - 140, D 100-120, F < 100. Damn. I got a bloody D. What the hell am I doing in Berkeley? I really hate that sinking feeling again. I thought I was on the road to recovery after a few great scores in my past few tests and now I am back in the shit hole again. Am I not suited to come to Berkeley after all? At the same time, I heard loud moans around the class.

After the reality has sunk into us, he broke the dead silence. "These gradings are before we curve it, here's how things changed after curve." A+ >160, A >130, A- 120-130, B+ 110-120, B 100-110, B- 90-100, C+ 80-90 etc. Jesus Christ. My whole heart momentarily jumped off. I just got myself a B+ close to an A-. What a dramatic change. I expected myself to do decent for this paper but maybe not as much as an B+ since I wasn't wholehearted when I do the paper and I have never been a great writer. Apparently, those outspoken whites who always fight to talk in class are less fluent in writing or they have problem spotting issues which is strange to me. Well, heck, I just wanna rejoice for now. There's even a student questioning if that grading distribution is final to which the lecturer answered, " You think I have so much time to kill and do nothing for the rest of class."

There you go. Isn't it interesting to have such a lecturer teaching you? Lots of excitement and unpredictability. You never know when he's serious or when he's joking.