I failed an exam last week by Alice L. '24

I failed an 18.600⁠01 probability and random variables exam last week. At risk of sounding dramatic, I don’t even need to wait for scores to come back to know I failed. I definitely failed because I didn’t remember half the vocabulary for this exam; because I fell asleep mid-exam; and, as a result, because I left most of it blank.

cue the five stages of grief:

i. denial

in which I wake up, horrified, with about twenty minutes left and a blank exam in front of me, and then start speeding through it because surely something is better than nothing and maybe time will slow down enough for me to finish this exam or maybe I still retain something from my contest math days and can totally do a notoriously difficult exam in a fraction of the time

ii. anger

I walk out of the exam room and aimlessly wander around campus for a while. I’m mad at myself — I’m at risk of failing a math class, and there’s still a very small part of me that lives in contest-math-world and feels insecure about herself and needs to prove her worth to everyone around her by excelling at math. I’m mad at MIT: I’m taking 102 units in an attempt to start my MEng next semester, and I do not want to be taking 102 units, and I somehow don’t have any better options than what I’m currently doing. I vaguely want to shake my fist at the sky and ask what I did wrong to deserve being this tired and this hosed and this abandoned by institutional support systems, and I want to curl up in a ball and demand “why don’t I get to be a perfectly average student with perfectly average problems?!!” to someone, anyone, as if this student existed anyways

iii. bargaining

Maybe dropping 80% of my classes will make S^3 take me seriously — maybe I have finally failed hard enough to prove that I needed help as a frosh and they screwed up then and I am not just one more grade-grubbing premed obviously trying to exploit the system. ⁠02 to be clear I find this stereotype pretty harmful and dislike the fact that we, institutionally, tell anyone asking for help that they do not need help Maybe withdrawing from this semester entirely will prove to SFS that I was not lying and that I am doing this because I really don’t know what options I have left except to speedrun most of my second major in one semester. Maybe if I just shatter hard enough then people will finally help me —

(hint: they will not.)

iv. depression

I submit a drop form for the class to my advisor, mostly because I don’t want to have to think about that exam again. I want to drop a couple extra classes out of spite, mostly because dropping 18.600 ruins my carefully planned schedule anyways and I am deeply and existentially tired from my silly little attempt at 102 units and I will still be deeply and existentially tired at 90 units. I want to withdraw from MIT entirely and become a hermit in the woods — surely I can figure out how to make enough money to Not Starve — because I do not want to do any of this anymore

v. acceptance

So I’ve failed an exam. Possibly in a ridiculous kind of way, but what happened happened, and so now what?

1. An post-mortem of the exam
   I did not do well on this exam because I didn’t remember how to take words like “marginal probability” and turn them to math terms, even if I knew how to do the math from there. I would know this better if I had spent more time with the material over the last few weeks, at least enough to be able to go from word problems to mathematical notation

   I did not do well on this exam because I had four midterms and slept an average of 2 hours/night this week, and my average last week is not much better. My brain is probably full of cellular debris right now and I guess I’m not that surprised it decided to turn off as soon as I sat down in a relatively quiet environment

   I’ve been doing pretty well on the psets, where I can look up what terms like “marginal probability” refer to, so I think I am probably good on the actual math at hand and would not hugely benefit from spending a lot of time going through lectures and retaking all my notes

2. Short-term fixes
   I text my grad student that I am going to finish writing a protocol relevant to my SuperUROP project tomorrow and take a 36-hour nap

   I look at my last exam and pset grades, and calculate whether I might be able to scrape a passing grade in the class assuming a 0 on this exam, and I might. I make a small list of vocabulary terms next to their math equivalent and tape it to the wall above my desk. Even if I drop the class, they’re probably still worth learning

3. Long-term…well, they’re not really fixes
   I can’t definitively say that my poor performance is solely caused by sleep deprivation⁠03 I do remember enough to say that correlation isn't causation! , but I also think it doesn’t really matter why I failed, at least not beyond actionable items to prevent this from happening again. I am not suddenly less competent or worth less today than I was last week. I don’t want to be someone who believes that people who make mistakes are lesser people, and so I will not apply that to myself

   I’m still kind of upset that I am suddenly doing considerably worse than I expected in a subject that I pride myself on being good at, but hey, P/NR exists and I might as well use one sometime. My drop form is approved, but not submitted to registrar — I’m going to give it another day and reconsider whether I have enough bandwidth to study for this final. After all, the worst thing that could happen is an NR, which means basically nothing happens, and that’s really not that bad

   I go find some things that make me happy. My research makes me happy; cats make me happy; chocolate is holding up what’s left of my sanity; and so now I am back to writing my silly lil protocol while hanging out with PUF with my chocolate⁠04 I definitely did not stash some in my backpack at the last blogger meeting zipped away out of their reach

Things will be okay. Maybe my 18.600 grade won’t be, but he’s a very small thing, and therefore can be treated as negligible. Things (approximately) will be okay.