Saturday, February 13, 2010

Just mildly flipping out, right?

I have my first midterm exam on Monday. It's on microeconomics. I'm really, really disliking this class. My dislike doesn't have that much to do with the instructor, who is fine in person as a lecturer but who has a rather extreme tendency to flip flop on course requirements (you have to do two case studies/no wait, just one; you can write a paper instead/oh, no, you can't/oh, yes, you can; the midterm will be closed book and open note/I mean closed book and closed note/(and after strenuous protests from the class that that wasn't school policy) OK, open book and open note).

It's the subject matter. The instructor made a comment last week that our textbook is more theoretical and model based than others he's seen (oh, joy) and what that means is that there's a whole heck of a lot of algebra and formulas and graphing and much less plain English discussing why economics is important for a manager to understand.

I actually have a minor in economics from my undergrad career, but I wonder now if economic theory was easier to understand 20-some years ago, cause this subject is a bear for me to understand. I am anticipating significant freaking out in the next few days, until I get the exam (which our instructor is scheduling for three hours) over with.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

You will do fine Deb! Marcia

Deb said...

It was rather awful, really. He gave us 2 hrs and 45 minutes to complete the test and I used 2 hrs and 40 minutes--and frankly I guessed on the last four problems.

About half of the items were definitions or other easier problems. The other 30 were all challenging.

Ugh.

Anonymous said...

Deb you could drop out!!!lol

Deb said...

Considering the amount of money I'm paying for school, they should just drop As in my pocket! I'll know what my score is on Monday night.

kerry said...

Hope you did well (or at least well enough!). The biggest challenge seem to be dealing with the instruction who can't make and stick to a decision - that would be driving me around the bend! How do you cope?

Deb said...

My score has been posted online. I got an 85 out of 100, which is a little better than I had dared to hope. I'm just glad it's over and I don't have to think about my final exam for at least a couple of more weeks!

As to how I cope with the instructor's wishy-washyness--mostly I complain about him with my fellow students before he arrives at class.

And I have another example--last week I came in and a classmate said, did you do homework? I said, what homework? we weren't assigned homework! She told me it was online. When we complained the professor, he said, OK, instead of it being due tonight, you have another week.

Sheesh.