For Whom the Bell (Curve) Tolls

There can be no cooler concept in academia than that of grading on a bell curve. It is this curve concept that has bailed my butt out of many a close call in my quest for the perfect 4.0 GPA. In fact, I’m sure my raw GPA is actually somewhere around 2.8, but thanks to bell curve grading, I’m holding strong at a 4.0.

Take one of my last classes, for example: Physics 201. This is the Trig-based Physics, not even the Calculus based Physics. I thought this was going to be a really easy class since there was no Calculus required. Ha! Think again! This was about the most screwed up class I’ve ever attended. From not having a real instructor for the first three weeks of the course to finally ending up with an instructor fresh off the boat from India who showed up so late we couldn’t drop the course, all the odds were stacked against anyone doing well in this class.

Here is a fine example of the many challenges this class offered:

This professor, though he was a nice individual, had a VERY thick Indian accent. Additionally, he appeared to have learned British English, not American English. The combination of these two factors sometimes made it damn near impossible to understand what the heck he was saying. Case in point – during the lecture on Energy, he kept saying that energy had to be conjured. Conjured? How does one conjure energy? Are we Wiccan? But he kept saying it, so I wrote it down in my notes hoping that we’d never be tested on that. It took me about two weeks to realize that he was saying “conserve” energy, not conjure energy. Fascinating.

Anyway, my raw score at the end of this class was an 84%, minus the final exam, which I estimated to be around the mid-B range, with partial credit. Well, at least the dude had the kindness and decency to “conjure” my ass an A grade. As this was a 4 credit-hour class, this bodes well for GPA maintenance.

You’d think this would be really great news, considering GPA is one of the most important factors in gaining admittance to vet school, or any graduate school for that matter. However, while part of me is ecstatic that I appear to be some kind of kick ass student, the realistic side of me says, “holy crap, this is how people like me (with seemingly modest intelligence) put MD or DVM after their names!” ‘Tis a sobering thought, indeed.

So, then, taking all of THAT into account, the worry wart side of me kicks in and thinks, OK, maybe someday some vet school is actually going to let me in through their doors. Then what? Will I know all I need to know to do well in such an environment? Will my community college education have been good enough to get me where I need to be to become a good critter doctor? Will I keep up? Will I excel? Shall I befriend an especially nerdy-I-mean-gifted person now to keep in my back pocket for later tutoring purposes? Maybe I should have eaten the rabbit turds that the freckled fifth grader on my school bus called smart pills. Oh, the worry! Oh, the fret!

Seriously, it’s these thoughts that keep me up at night. And all this because my dumb ass actually managed to score an A in Physics. Who’da thunk it? Without a doubt, I had no business ending up with an A in that class. For crying out loud, this is the class where I scored my first D score on an exam, like, EVER. Considering the presumed raw score, that must have been hell of a bell curve. You’d think I’d just be happy and move on.

Well, as I do not have a class to worry about right now (until tomorrow anyway) I need something to worry about. That seems like a worthy topic: Just How The Hell I Ended Up With An ‘A’ In Physics: What This Really Means For All Earthly Fauna.

Methinks I’ll write a book.