I went to physics class—a university class in a big lecture hall—and discovered it was exam day. Uh-oh. I had not studied at all.
The girl on my left was doing some last-minute review. “Remember-“ she told me, and recited the orientation of two half-circles in a formula. I forgot the orientation instantly. I frantically searched my notes for the info, but I couldn’t find it, and then the exam started.
The exam was long. I felt I did passably on the first few pages, but then there came whole pages where I knew nothing at all. (The pages were brightly illustrated, like a three-year-old’s activity coloring book.) Some material I recognized, some I didn’t. There was a subject I was sure was not in my notes, and had not been explained in class (as far as I could recall), but it had been alluded to as an exam subject; I had intended to look into it “at some point,” but had not, and now it was too late. Two more exam pages left blank.
Even copiously skipping pages where I didn’t know anything, I didn’t manage to make it to the end of the exam before time was called.
I wondered, was this one of those nightmarishly curved classes where no one gets above 40% and a raw score of 30% could get you an A? But even so, I knew I got nowhere near a “good student” score. I thought about withdrawing from the course to save my GPA. (Would it affect my GPA, seeing as I had already graduated? Probably it would. Why did I take a physics course after graduating, anyway?) But then I remembered it was April and likely too late to withdraw anyway…