First Semester: Accomplished!

As of 9 pm Thursday (12/13/12), I was done with my first semester of graduate school.

You would think I’d be thrilled about that, and I am, but when the night ended, I was pretty darn upset.

Finals Tribulations

My last final of the semester was for my MBA Accounting class. I had been studying for it (and my other two finals, of course) for the better part of a week. It was on Managerial Accounting, which I enjoy, and have a pretty good handle on, but there were a few pieces that I wanted to make sure I was solid on.

So anyway, there was studying. By the afternoon before the test, I was feeling pretty good about my prospects. We started the test at 6:30, and the teacher told us that we would have until 8:30 to complete the exam, not 9:00, like we were used to. ‘Whatever,’ we thought, ‘the teacher said that everyone who’s taken it early was done in 90 minutes. We should be fine.’

WRONG.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The test was long, challenging, and took every minute of the two hours that we were given. At least that’s what I was told. I got done, I thought, at around 8:10. I wrote my supposed ‘last’ answer on the answer sheet, saw that I had 20 minutes before the end of the exam, and went back through and checked all my answers.

It was only when I got to what I had thought was the last page (15 minutes later) when I realized there was actually a whole other page, with two long problems on it. Looking at the clock, I had five minutes left before the end of the test, which was not enough time to do those long problems.

I worked through one of them as quickly as I could, my heart racing. I finished the first problem, although I’m not sure how accurate my answers were because me and ‘doing math in a hurry’ have never got along well. I turned to the second problem, and the teacher told us time was really up, and to turn in our tests.

I’m a little ashamed to admit that I burst into tears. I was just so frustrated.

The problem I had rushed through was a bond problem, which I knew backwards and forwards from helping one of my classmates work through them. The other, which I didn’t get to at all, was a transactional analysis problem (Balance Sheet and Income Statement) for a manufacturing business, which I knew pretty well when we went through it in class, but there were one or two pieces of it that I always got wrong. I studied those pieces specifically, because the teacher as good as told us a transactional analysis problem would be on the test.

I went up to the teacher and explained to her about not noticing the last page until the test was almost over, and how I was really frustrated because I knew that I could have done well on those sections since I studied them specifically, etc., etc. She was sympathetic (which is so nice) and told me that she would grade my test with and without that last problem, and if it made a difference in my final letter grade, she would just not count the last question.

That is very, very, very nice of her, and I am incredibly grateful, but I know I did well on the rest of the test, and I would rather have a good grade due to the merits of my work, rather than due to an act of generosity and understanding on the part of the teacher.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take whatever grade she gives me and I’ll be fine with it; I just wish I could have noticed that last page sooner, because I know that I would have aced those two problems if I’d had more than a few minutes on them.

Looking ahead

But yes, the semester is done. After the final, a bunch of us from the accounting class went to Old Chicago for drinks, which was very welcome.

Despite how challenging this past semester has been, I’m really looking forward to next semester. I’m taking two classes instead of three (yay!) and I’ll only be at school until 9 pm on one evening.

I still don’t know for sure what books I will need for these next two classes, nor when my tuition bill will be due. But I’m sure I’ll find those things out in the next few weeks.