[Barry the Sprout]

Just finished my finals. Had my last exam yesterday, and I am so glad they're all over. This has been the worst exam season I've ever had, everything seemed to go wrong all at once.

My grandmother has been bed bound since about Christmas and was hospitalised shortly before the start of this term. She was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer in her rib cage and spine just before my exam started. She died two days before the exam I was most worried about, which screwed me up pretty badly. Its good that she's in no more pain, as she was clearly suffering in the last few months, and she was in her late seventies so it could be worse. But that doesn't make things a great deal better really. The world has been deprived of one more truly kind and generous person.

And then my examiners started becoming real bastards. In particular, the exam I was worried about (Morality and Values - a philosophy course, my degree is in government and economics) had questions in it that just plain weren't anything to do with the course. Call me stupid but if all of the reading on a topic is on intellectual monism, and the force of the lecture is on intellectual monism, and all the practice quetsions are on intellectual monism, then I don't expect the exam question to be on ideas of pleasure. In fact, I'm incapable of answering a question on ideas of pleasure, which leaves me having done all of the work required for the topic and being unable to do the exam. The exam didn't test your ability to use critically the knowledge of the course. In fact, I'm not sure what it tested. I just think it was very poorly written as it lowers all the people who've done work to the level of those who haven't and thus fails in its primary goal of discriminating between them and awarding grades accordingly. Thats a year long course I might as well not have done = one pissed off Barry.

And one of my other exams is also really annoying me. I didn't feel I'd done brilliantly on the coursework for it so I decided to blitz a couple of extended topics for the exam to make up for it. None of them came up. The odds against it are rather slim, but they managed somehow!

The upshot of all of this is that I've got to get two 60+ grades this year to get one overall. I've done a lot of work this year to make sure I get them, but I'm still worrying. It feels like I've been tripped over at the last hurdle. I've been scuppered by stuff I can't control, and it could cost me a degree class. I'm glad they're now over, but I just feel angry, frustrated, and horribly depressed. I've been feeling so crap recently that it was actually good to go home for my grandmothers funeral as at least then I saw my family...

Oh anyway, rant over. Thank you for listening.