Unfortunately this last week starting on Monday I’ve been battling with a fever and runny nose and all the fun stuff that comes along with a normal illness of the sort. Today my nose is still a little stuffed and my body is still a little achy, but I’ve definitely passed the worst of it. Fortunately I was able to make all my classes during the week despite my illness, and also luckily I had no assignments that I had to spend much time on during the week, so I was able to take the time I needed to rest without falling behind. It is a good thing I’m feeling better now because next week I have two assignments due, and my first two tests, one day after the other.
I’m actually a little nervous for these tests because the general academic feel here is very different. When I got my first few assignments back I was worried to see that I was only getting around 75% of the marks on them. I realized looking over the assignments that it was partly due to some silly mistakes on my part, and partly just really harsh grading. They seem to like the all or nothing approach to grading here, which I’m not a huge fan of. The one thing to note about those percentages is that here the grading system is different, and 80-100 is an A, and 70-80 is a B, so even those marks weren’t terrible. But looking ahead to these tests I’m worried that the grading will be similar, so I’m going to be studying harder then I normally would for a test at this point in the semester with the weighting that it has. Just so no one thinks I’m going slipping, I just got my second physics assignment back today, and I approached it expecting a harder grading system, and I got 23.5/25 marks, or 94% which given the system is a really good grade. I’d also like to note that if I had not accidently skipped one part of one of the questions I’d have gotten two more marks (yes that is over 100%).
I got some sushi on my way back from the Uni today as well, it’s relatively cheap here, I got my dinners worth for about $5US and I’ll attach a pic so you all can see what I’m using to build up my reserves for a long weekend of studying.
