Goldie Locks
December 14th, 2005 by Ethan
Going into the final exam of the week, I felt a little bit like the classic children’s tale character Goldie Locks. There had been three exams so far and one left to go. The three bears in my allegory were my exams to date. One was too soft (Cost Accounting), one was way, way too hard (Microeconomics), and one was just about right (Marketing Management). While the Marketing exam was still easier than most, at least it fit the class.
It seemed like the professors for both Cost Accounting and Microeconomics just threw in the towel toward the end of the module, but they took two very different approaches to “giving up.” Cost Accounting became a cake-walk and Microeconomics morphed into a classroom nightmare. The Cost Accounting exam seemed like a bunch of softball questions, testing our knowledge only on the surface with no questions designed to truly differentiate between comprehension and memorization. The Microeconomics exam consisted of 80 multiple choice questions (some requiring complex calculations, most requiring significant consideration) and 4 multiple part problem-type questions. The testing period was 1 hour and 50 minutes, meaning that the huge majority of individuals wound up answering questions blindly in order to just have something to turn in that wasn’t half blank. This exam was 100% of our course grade.
The last exam, Finance, went well. That class easily ran away with the “class of the module” award. It really wasn’t much of a contest. That wraps up one semester of business school, and I am 1/4 of my way to a Notre Dame MBA. Now I have a full 5 weeks of R&R.