davidvoegtle.net

Yesterday was kind of weird. There were rumors all week that my school would close after noon for Good Friday. Supposedly the governor had in the past decreed state workers could leave early, but hadn’t last year. Thus, there was some confusion as to whether he would this year.

I have it on good authority that he has not done any such thing in the last eighteen years.

Regardless, he did not, and so my afternoon classes were on as scheduled (my morning class having been cancelled earlier in the week for different reasons).

My first class, at 1, was lightly attended. Just before class, I had stopped by to see the TA, who was returning the test we took a couple of weeks ago. I did well, a 94.

Now, a 94 is good. I recognize that. But it’s not what I consider spectacular. It’s just uhm…expected. Especially since we knew pretty well what the material would be and we were allowed a full sheet of notes (this is a programming class).

I also didn’t consider the test especially difficult. Four questions involved writing methods for specific tasks, not any of which were that challenging. Three dealt with recursion, so there was a trick to each of those. The fifth problem asked to show the steps that an algorithm we had gone over in class took to reach a solution. For you programming nerds, it was asking us to take an unsorted array, and show the steps a quick sort algorithm would take to sort it (using the first element as a pivot).

Now, since I picked up the test immediately before class, I didn’t have any time to talk with the TA about the test. I just ran the block and a half or so from the lab to class.

I did get there a few minutes early, and only two other students were there so far. The girl asked me how I had done, because she could see I was carrying my test. I told her, and she exclaimed with quite a bit of surprise. Apparently I’d done really well. She asked if I had heard what the class average was yet. I said no. Well, the class average was 64.

Huh.

I later learned that there was one 94. The next highest score was somewhere in the 70s, of which there were a few. After that scores trailed all the way down through the 60s, and on into the 30s. The one question everyone missed, except for me, was the question about quick sort.

Anyway, I might take to wearing body armor to school for a while. It’s too bad it’s almost summer in Texas. That will get really uncomfortable really quick, I think.