Thursday, December 19, 2013

I am pleasantly surprised...

...but will also warn you, that due to my perfectionist tendencies in things related to academia, I am slightly annoyed with myself, so I will be complaining and making excuses. Since this is my blog, I think I'm entitled. Lol.

Final grades for this semester were posted yesterday. My grades were:

Criminal Justice = A
Intro to International Relations = A
Psychology of Racism = A
Learning Theory = A-

which means my semester GPA was a 3.91. (So, I should just shut up and move on with my life. But I'm not going to because of reasons.)

Criminal Justice wasn't too much of a shock, although, the multiple-choice on the final was surprisingly tricky in comparison to the midterm material.

I was shocked to see that I had achieved a solid A in International Relations because, frankly, that class was hard and confusing and not at all taught like a 100-level class should be taught. Politics isn't easy, and when the class starts out above your head, you feel like you're drowning...FAST. That, coupled with the fact that the professor posted absolutely zero grades on Blackboard online, so no one had any clue what there grades looked like at any point in the semester. So, I was very happy with my A there.

Honestly, Psych of Racism was, by far, my easiest class, and I expected nothing less than the A I received.

Finally, we come to Learning. (I added the 'theory' to the class title earlier because I believe it to be confusing to just call the class 'Learning.' We learned classical and operant conditioning, if that helps clarify.) Now, there are a two things that prevented me from achieving a solid A in this class; one of those things was beyond my control. First, I had a graduate student as my instructor. This is not uncommon, and I am pretty sure that I will, at some point in my graduate career, appreciate that colleges and universities allow their graduate students the opportunity to work to pay for their education. I have had one spectacular graduate student instructor, with whom I have taken 2 classes and am taking one more with her in my final semester. I have had two decent graduate student instructors, and I achieved As in their classes. (I should, also, note that all of the previous classes taken with graduate students were 200-level or below, and Learning is a 300-level. This might have been a poor choice of what class she should teach her first time around...maybe...) This graduate student was teaching a class for the first time. I know, they all have to start somewhere. And, I have to say, by the end of the semester, she had this teaching thing under control. But the first three weeks of classes were not good. There were numerous things that we had to bring to her attention that were hindering our ability to grasp the complex theories. This is half of the reason, I believe, that I got a pretty low B on the first test. During this same time, I was still enrolled in the history class that I eventually dropped. Because I was trying to keep up with the work in the history class, I missed out on an extra credit opportunity that would have brought my low B up to a mid A. I decided to drop the history class too late, and this is why I am annoyed with myself. If I had dropped that history class 4 days sooner, I could have done the extra credit, and the 4.0 semester would have been mine.

Anyway, I'll stop with the whining. I know that I did well, but the +/- system sucks when you're on the minus end of it. My seven-semester cumulative GPA is a 3.72 now, which is up .03 from the spring. My psychology GPA is a 3.80 up .01, and my Roosevelt GPA is a 3.87 up .02.

I'm ready to kick serious patootie next semester with 18 hours/6 classes. One more chance to get a 4.0 semester in my undergraduate career.

<3 Amber Marie

p.s. 5.5 days until I am back in NOLA!

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