Midterms

Two down, one to go (next Tuesday). My predictions: social = A, cognitive = B. I would be satisfied with such a result.

I felt like I underperformed relative to my knowledge base on the cognitive exam, partly due to getting zapped on the first two, obviously supposed to be "easy" questions. But over the course of the test period, I did remember enough to get some partial credit. (If this exam had been linear and computer-adaptive like the GRE, question 3 would have read "Most people have how many brains?" with response options 0 and 1.) I was also disappointed that I simply could not think of a relevant experiment for one of the essay questions, but later when looking at my notes realized that the primary experiment was one that I had, on a previous assignment, myself suggested before we discussed this experiment in class. D'oh.

However, I do not feel that I was cheated or had especially bad luck or anything, nor do I feel that I should have studied more. With the massive amounts of information that we covered, and the fact that exams do test performance, which means among other things being able to remember the right things at the right times, it seemed likely that I would get questions that I simply could not in the moment recall the appropriate information to full answer. It's possible that if "study more" had meant study really, really hard throughout the entire semester so that by the time of the exam I was thoroughly familiar with the information I could have ensured myself a very high grade, but within the realistic constraints of having other things to do that are, without doubt, more important than learn to the zillionth degree this material that is outside my research area, it's not like spending an extra day or two studying hard before the exam would have helped appreciably. I figure I just would have forgotten different information.

This being said, I am finally reaching that point in cognitive where everything starts to seem connected, which is always a helpful sign that you have developed a schema to organize information around.