It’s that wonderful time of year once again! I can’t wait to get back home for a couple of weeks and spend some much needed quality time with my hubby and family. I wish I could say I have most of my Christmas shopping done, but that would be a flat out lie. I have a couple things, but not much. It’s hard because I’m still relatively far away from shopping areas and with being on course I have other priorities like studying and passing my classes.
I booked my train home last week. Thank you Via Rail for your Black Friday deals! All fares were reduced plus I also got an additional discount. I went with Business Class because I can and I wanted to spoil myself a little. Honestly, if you can, choose Business class! It’s worth every cent! More leg room, meals and drinks all included. Priority boarding, access to the business class lounges where there’s more free drinks/food. It’s a pleasant experience overall.
I had a rather difficult exam yesterday morning. I felt so confident going in and then I opened the exam book and suddenly I felt like Jon Snow.
The problem stems from how wordy the questions are. There were a lot of trick questions. Most exams are like that and it’s incredibly frustrating. I know the subject matter, it’s just gah! The way they word the questions could drive you up the wall! My other issue with the exam is that there were questions on there about stuff we hardly talked about in class. So that gets a little annoying.
We had our practical exam this morning and again I felt pretty good about it before hand. I did really well on the practise exam the day before but my goodness! The first 2 faults were BRUTAL. I got the second one wrong, which I had a feeling would happen. Given the symptoms and comparing the readings to my nominals, it was hard to determine where the fault actually was. From the sounds of it a lot of my course-mates struggled with the first 2 faults. The last 3 were a breeze. At least for me anyways. But still, afterwards I was stressing so much!
It’s especially stressful having to sit in a room for over an hour just waiting to find out if you passed or failed. Then everyone starts to discuss the exam and you start to second guess your answers. It’s just a downwards spiral! I was freaking out in my head. What if I failed and had to do a retest? What if I failed the retest? How far back would they recourse me? Everyone is different, some people get lucky and only go back a course or two. Others aren’t that lucky. There’s a girl who just failed out of amplifiers (approx 3-4 months into POET) and is being sent all the way back to the very beginning.
Supposedly they send you back to where they feel you began to struggle. But each case is different and they look at a number of things other than your marks, like your attitude, whether you’re staying for extra help when it’s offered, etc… But seeing as this would be my first fail, would I be able to get on the course right after mine? Or would they send me further back? I’ve been here for nearly 6 months, I con’t think I could handle doing all the all over again.
Thankfully I passed. I did get the second fault wrong. I wanted to argue it because based on my symptoms and reading, they wouldn’t have lead me to where the actual fault was. But I didn’t want to fight it. I didn’t want to argue. I took my passing grade as it was. I was just so relieved. No more stressing! At least until my next set of exams next week.
The Wandering Iris 