I cannot judge my own performance

[trinityvixen]

So, apparently, the test was a psych-out. I did tolerably well--I got the exact class average--and all the questions that had me despairing were both misleading and evil. For instance, we were given a molecule made up of 10,000 glucose molecules and asked, given the way it was constructed, to number the reducing ends and determine the reducing power of the sugar. There were three or four questions in this vein, suggesting, if you read into the psychology of such a question, that there should be some complicated answer. You don't keep asking questions about this unless there's an interesting or varying answer. I kept looking and looking and looking and all I could come up with was that it had one reducing end and, as a result of having one reducing end to 10,000 glucose residues, it basically had a reducing power of 0.

Turns out, that's right. Do you see what I mean about it being misleading? There was another question where the bulk of the points went to drawing the molecule and then there were two more questions: 1) Are there any reducing residues? and 2) If so, which residues are reducing? To my logical mind, you don't ask that follow-up question unless there are reducing residues. But there weren't. So I felt like I must have been missing something major when I wrote 1) No, and 2) None of them. I wanted to write "...none?" 'cause that's how I felt. I thought for sure I'd screwed something up majorly. Nope. Psych!

I can breathe a little easier now that that worry is off my mind. Just in time to start panicking again for the next midterm! Joy of joys!
 

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

My high school European history teacher's favorite question to put on tests was, "Who was Boyle's Law of Gases actually discovered by?" Answer: Boyle.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

...that's just evil.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

I had a differential equations final that made us prove the equation used in the patent of the hydrogen bomb.

...turns out that they got the equation wrong. The only way to get the question right was to have the courage to say the answer was different than what it says in a 50 year old legal document filed by nuclear physicists.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

...wow. I continue to be amazed at how low some of these tests can go.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I had a test in statistical mechanics in college where the teacher had left out a negative sign, making an equation unsolvable. I realized this while walking to the next class. When I went back to tell him, he looked at it and said, "Huh. You're right."

No adjustment to our scores even though a third of the test was unsolvable.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Ooh, we had one of those. They actually figured it out with ten minutes left in the test period. So they told us to go ahead and skip that one. Never mind, I'd wasted a third of the time trying to solve it instead of doing the other problems...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, I remember what Boyle's law is all these years later, so it worked!

Also, trick questions like that were all over most of my tests. That's what you get for going to a school with kids too clever for their own good. So I always had an eye out for trick questions.

One of my favorites--in physics the first question was "You are running to catch a train..." and it had relative velocities and angles and all that. Last question? What is the shoe size of the person in the first question? The teacher got back indignant comments that it was impossible to know from the information given, or one person tried to work it out from velocity, which you can't.

We were all smart asses, so it makes sense that our teacher's were.