Useless and random

I am now finished with all my exams for this year! Yay.

I did fail my first exam ever though, it was on Sustainable Development. We got a list of articles of about 70 pages total and the teacher just said “Know this.” The first time around I studied it all very carefully, put down as much time as I usually do an exam and went to the exam, answered every question and felt pretty confident about it. I got back the result; 27.5 points, 32 was required to pass.

I was dumbfounded, absolutely utterly speechlessly amazed. How the hell did that happen? I checked out the exam and I had answered wrong on some stuff but.. some stuff was just utterly confusing.

Today I got to re-do the exam, the teacher was kind enough to schedule the re-exam for today instead of August because I’m going to Japan so I wouldn’t be able to do it in August.

So yesterday I read through most of the papers again. The first time around I pretty much knew it all by heart and this time around I just read up on the same stuff and got back some of the knowledge I had a few weeks ago when I wrote it the first time. I didn’t study anything else, I didn’t memorize more of it, just repeated the same stuff. I wanted to do more, but she had given us that list and nothing else so I didn’t really know what else I could do.

I went in to the exam today and answered every question, felt exactly the same as before, the test was at the same “difficulty level”. This time I did a preliminary point calculation, and according to myself; worst-case was getting 27 points, best case was getting 39 points. I handed it in and she graded it right away (also nice of her). Turns out, I got 47 points this time! The maximum was 53.

What? I have no more knowledge and I get a little under twice as many points?! How can that be? Well, according to me, that is the text-book example of a bad test. I have given this course some pretty scathing (but constructive) reviews, and I can’t express in words how pissed off I have been at both the course, the course material and the teachers.

This course is, summed up: Useless and random. I have learned nothing and every single piece of the course have been completely random whether you passed or not.

This course has taught me one thing though:

My life is a quest to get away from useless and random.

That’s why I chose engineering in the first place, this is the first course I’ve ever felt this way about, normally engineering is scientific, pragmatic and it’s about understanding; not memorizing. I think that’s why I like startups and small companies so much. I know that useless and random exist everywhere in life, but it seems like they (startups and small companies) get to focus a lot more, they get to avoid a lot of the useless and random that big companies have to put up with during their day. I really, really hate useless and random.