Endorphin High

[ciroccoj]

Well, I slept less than 3 hours last night and spent the 3 hours this morning regurgitating Everything I Ever Never Wanted To Know About Divorce (AKA FamLaw) for 100% of my mark in the class, and I'm totally buzzed.

Because here's one of the things I like love the most about myself: I love exams.

No, really. They're fun. Also nerve-wrecking and a royal pain to study for, but there's something very satisfying about reading a question and realizing you know the answer. Or reading a question, panicking because you don't know the answer, leaving it till later, coming back to it and realizing that yeah, you just needed to let it burble in your subconscious for a bit. Or plunging in with no idea what you're doing, grasping at straws, and realizing that you know what? Your straws are pretty solid after all, and have a chance of actually being the right answer.

Exams are like a game. Like Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy, crosswords puzzles and online quizzes. Except that you study for them, pay exorbitant amounts of money to take them, and they can affect your ability to get a job.

This class and exam in particular gave me a chance to do what I do best. I'm a very linear thinker, and I'm pretty good at math & logic. Did my undergrad in Computing Science. So when most of my colleagues got helplessly bewildered by Equalization Payments and Child Support quantums, I zipped right on through. It's just math & logic; once you figure out the pattern, it all comes together like Sudoku.

Mind you, none of this guarantees that I got a good mark on the class. I feel like I aced it, but one of the downfalls of 100% exams is that you really have no idea how well you grasp the concepts, or what kinds of answers your prof is expecting, until it's really too late. So for all I know I just bombed the thing.

It was still fun, though :)

Comments

[scrtkpr.livejournal.com]

I know just what you mean about exams being like a game and therefore enjoyable even when sometimes a bit stressful. (Or a lot stressful, as 100% exams would surely be for me!) Still, it's been 5 years since I graduated, and I'm still not feeling that strong of an urge to return for graduate studies. lol Maybe someday when the kiddos are older.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Still, it's been 5 years since I graduated, and I'm still not feeling that strong of an urge to return for graduate studies. lol Maybe someday when the kiddos are older.
Heh, yeah I wasn't feeling much examlove for about five or six years after graduating. Eventually decided to go back to school and then remembered Oh yeah, exams - forgot about that! Doh! Maybe this school thing isn't such a wise thing...

Happily, I decided to try to get into law school, and before you get in you have to sit the LSATs, which is just a brutal pummelling of your brain. I was semi-stressing over it and then I happened to take an LSAT prep course where the instructor referred to the "Logic Problems" part of the test (the part everyone sweats the most) as the "Games" section.

Words have power. I suddenly realized that the kinds of problems I was working through for that part of the LSAT were things I would've jumped into quite happily if I had come across them on the back page of a newspaper. And then they weren't that intimidating any more.

And then I extrapolated that for the rest of the LSAT and that helped, too. Then it was only a short hop to expanding that for most of my exams and presto, 50% less stress.

Now, if I could just find a way to do that for my essays...

[scrtkpr.livejournal.com]

"Games" is a much better word than "problems." I'll have to file that one away. The interesting thing about essays is that they are the easiest thing in the world for me, even the in-class ones, if they're in any subject other than English. English in-class essays kill me. I suppose I'm too much of a perfectionist and stall out. And I take forever writing English term papers. Or I did. Because, as I mentioned, I've had 5 years of freedom from that.

You know, you could probably think of an essay as a game too. I always look at an essay as a problem to solve, of sorts. Identify the thesis, the supporting parts, then break those supporting parts into topic sentences with their own supporting parts. Outlining the essay can be a puzzle in itself, and then when you have a good outline, it practically writes itself.