First Exam – Done!

Before I started writing this post, I took a moment to go look back at Megan’s posts from two and a half years ago, when she was (weirdly enough) taking the same two classes I am taking this semester. I was vaguely comforted to look back and see that the first exam of Financial Accounting kicked her butt too.

I am a perfectionist, and I really expected to do better on the test than I did – 78.8%. I studied a lot, and stressed out a lot, and the amount of work I put in felt like at least a B, you know?

But I am taking a breath, and remembering:

• It was the first classroom exam I have taken in over three years
• My last accounting class before this was seven years ago
• I need a B in the class, meaning I could get about the same score on the other three tests, and as long as I get a high B on the paper and the project, I will be ok

Now obviously my previously stated perfectionism means that I want to do better than a C on my other tests. So what does that mean? A new study plan.

Part of the problem for the first exam I think is that I had to miss class #2 due to illness. That means that I missed the end of Chapter 3 and most of Chapter 4 (the first exam was on Chapters 1-5 with a heavy weight on Chapter 3).

Another huge problem is that whatever communication style my teacher has; I just . . . do not get it. Not so much that I don’t understand the concepts he’s teaching – but that I don’t understand which parts of the things he’s covering are actually important. He has these long PowerPoint presentations that he jets through at about 1,000 miles per hour, with certain slides that he hangs out on for a couple minutes – but he just seems to ramble while he sits on these slides.

Maybe it’s because my last college class was three years ago, maybe we just don’t have complimentary communication styles – either way, Financial Accounting is going to be a challenge. Which is about what I was expecting after Megan’s war stories.

So the new plan is to continue studying the teacher’s PowerPoint slides and taking detailed notes from his lectures – but also to spend a lot more time studying the book, since it seems that I am not getting everything I should be from the lectures, if the first test score is anything to judge by.

Much like Megan, I’m ending up spending way more time on the Financial Accounting class than the Management Accounting class. I’m a little worried it will end up biting me on the butt come midterms, but the Management Accounting class seems low key and simple. We’ll see if that changes once we get further into the semester.

I know that this post seems a little down, but I am actually feeling cautiously optimistic. I survived the first exam for Financial Accounting and I am slowly getting used to the flow of school again!