Had an Exam Experience where I Missed Out on High Score - How to Cope

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The discussion revolves around the frustration of realizing a missed answer on a mechanics exam shortly after completion, leading to feelings of disappointment and depression. Participants share experiences of similar situations, emphasizing that such occurrences are common in academic settings, particularly in challenging subjects like physics. They suggest that exam pressure can hinder performance and that coping with these feelings involves focusing on improvement for future assessments. The conversation shifts to anecdotes about mistakes in professional settings, illustrating that errors can happen in high-stakes situations, and the importance of thorough proofreading and preparation is highlighted. Ultimately, the discussion underscores that both academic and professional environments can be unforgiving, but learning from these experiences is crucial for growth.
sarvesh0303
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I just finished an online examination(on mechanics) and got the answer to a question 5 minutes after completing the exam. Feels so horrible, knowing that I could have got 97.5% instead of 86.5% had I got the idea during the exam. Has anybody ever had such an experience? If so, how do you cope with the depression that follows?
 
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I think it's quite common to either "get the question" after it's too late, or realize you wrote the wrong answer. There is no reason to get depressed. Just try to do better next time.
 
If you stick with physics you'll end up doing much worse on exams than an 86%... I know a friend who took an exam where the average score was less than 30%.
 
dipole said:
If you stick with physics you'll end up doing much worse on exams than an 86%... I know a friend who took an exam where the average score was less than 30%.

Guy 1: "Hey man, how'd you do on the exam?"
Guy 2: "I got a seven.."
Guy 1: "NICE!"
 
dipole said:
If you stick with physics you'll end up doing much worse on exams than an 86%... I know a friend who took an exam where the average score was less than 30%.

1MileCrash said:
Guy 1: "Hey man, how'd you do on the exam?"
Guy 2: "I got a seven.."
Guy 1: "NICE!"

:smile:

Yeah, sarvesh0303, I hate to break it to you, but it will get worse. Falling on your face is part of a physics education.

Buck up, sweetie - you can do it!
 
sarvesh0303 said:
I just finished an online examination(on mechanics) and got the answer to a question 5 minutes after completing the exam. Feels so horrible, knowing that I could have got 97.5% instead of 86.5% had I got the idea during the exam. Has anybody ever had such an experience? If so, how do you cope with the depression that follows?
yeah, that's unlucky. And I think also, during the exam, the exam pressure has an effect on the brain, which means those ideas are suppressed. I don't know if this happens to everyone. But it definitely seems like I must be more prepared for an exam than I would need to be if there was no pressure attached to the exam.
 
The standing joke about the Cambridge (UK) natural sciences tripos used to be: If you could only remember 5% of what the lecturers threw at you, you would fail. But if you could remember 10%, you got a first.

But all this angst is just practice for the real world. Wait till you get to write a report justifying a $50m research project, and then realize you made a dumb mistake five minutes after you hit the "submit" button. Been there, done that!
 
AlephZero said:
The standing joke about the Cambridge (UK) natural sciences tripos used to be: If you could only remember 5% of what the lecturers threw at you, you would fail. But if you could remember 10%, you got a first.

But all this angst is just practice for the real world. Wait till you get to write a report justifying a $50m research project, and then realize you made a dumb mistake five minutes after you hit the "submit" button. Been there, done that!
I was assigned to try to "win back" a multi-million dollar account that our office had lost. Even our VP was involved. I got a copy of the proposal, first paragraph, first page, were the words "I know you will agree that our rats are the best".

They all had copies of this, they all read it, not one person noticed, not one. Apparently the client noticed. I don't think they liked our rats.
 
Your company deals in selling domestic rats? I didn't know. So did you recover the contract in the end?

I had one horrible email experience where I had several drafts that I never sent out but wanted to remove from the drafts folder and save for my records. So I emailed them to my account but forgot to remove the on-copy people. The responses I got back astonished me as one pain in the butt senior architect thought I was still working on some project that he had been killed off earlier. No amount of explanation helped and I got reprimanded severely for my simple mistake even though it was clear that it was sent by me to me and he was on-copy.
 
Last edited:
  • #10
jedishrfu said:
Your company deals in selling domestic rats? I didn't know. So did you recover the contract in the end?

:bugeye:

The importance of an E...
 
  • #11
jedishrfu said:
Your company deals in selling domestic rats? I didn't know. So did you recover the contract in the end?
They had already signed a 3 year deal with the competition. I was too embarrassed to even contact them.
 
  • #12
Enigman said:
:bugeye:

The importance of an E...
You said it "E". :biggrin:
 
  • #13
Evo said:
first paragraph, first page, were the words "I know you will agree that our rats are the best"

Perhaps this was a statement about upper management?
 
  • #14
Vanadium 50 said:
Perhaps this was a statement about upper management?
V50, you are THE BEST! You always crack me up. :approve:
 
  • #15
Evo said:
You said it "E". :biggrin:

Well, it isn't "E"-zy running the rat race. :-p
 
  • #16
Enigman said:
:bugeye:

The importance of an E...
Even more important, disable that stupid autocorrect whilst writing a proposal, and enable someone with a brain to read the proposal before submitting it.

Rats!
 
  • #17
lol, I think this post looks a lot harsher than you meant, D H.
 
  • #18
BruceW said:
lol, I think this post looks a lot harsher than you meant, D H.

I just think some people here have more work experience than others.

FWIW my favorite "engage brain before hitting send" was a rejection letter for a proposal, with the following two reasons:

1. The proposed work was too ambitious and probability of success was too low.
2. The proposed work had already been completed, and reported in the literature.

Maybe there was a bug in the rejection-letter-generator app. It was only supposed to pick ONE option at random...
 
  • #19
Evo said:
first paragraph, first page, were the words "I know you will agree that our rats are the best".

Vanadium 50 said:
Perhaps this was a statement about upper management?

I thought it was a reference to rats trained to gnaw on competitors' fiber optic cables.
 
  • #20
BruceW said:
lol, I think this post looks a lot harsher than you meant, D H.
DH is right, if more people were capable of proofreading, or able to see obvious mistakes, they wouldn't have so many problems. Sorry to relay more of my experiences, but due to the fact that I was known for my very annoying ability to "see the obvious", I was tasked with saving accounts that no one could fix. One was a large company that had not been getting the "rats" they were promised (all contracts were custom). This had been going on for almost three years and they had sent notice of lawsuit if we didn't give them a huge sum of money, which they calculated we owed them. Every month their contract codes would disappear from their account, causing huge over billing, they would complain to their account team which would request the billing department to issue manual credits and order that the contract codes be re-added. The company was on their fourth account team when they advised of the lawsuit.

I was given a copy of the contract, and I looked into the billing system and sure enough, the contract codes kept disappearing. So I accessed the contract system and the contract had been accepted by legal and uploaded to the viewing system, but had never been loaded into the billing system, so to the billing system, the contract didn't exist, which was why the computer kept removing the manually added codes.

This took me all of 30 minutes from the time I was handed the file. I made some calls and got the contract into the system. I then noticed that there were tons of credits added each month that seemed wrong. Sure enough, the account teams didn't understand the contract terms (in their defense, they were very complicated) and had actually given the customer too many credits over the years, the customer owed *US* money.

On the conference call with the CFO of that company to go over my findings, he actually broke into tears, his company was facing bankruptcy and this could cause him to lose his job, we were talking about a LOT of money. It didn't go well, they did end up in bankruptcy (not our fault). I was teased for a long time "you made a customer cry".
 
  • #21
jtbell said:
I thought it was a reference to rats trained to gnaw on competitors' fiber optic cables.
Actually, our largest competitor's aerial fiber was repeatedly eaten by "rodents". Our guys at the New Jersey labs swear it was not the "mind controlled" experimental rats that had somehow escaped...

Gosh, this thread has gone a bit off topic. :redface:
 
  • #22
BruceW said:
lol, I think this post looks a lot harsher than you meant, D H.

I think Evo would agree that someone in her company should have seen the rats that sank their proposal before the proposal was sent out. She was sent in after the fact to rescue that sunken ship. That ship had already sailed, and it sank because it was infested with rats.

The opening paragraph in a proposal is extremely important. A company can win or lose business just based on that opening paragraph. The CEO (or some other highly placed executive) of the company that issued the request the proposals is going to read the opening paragraph of each proposal, the cost section, and not much else.
 
  • #23
Also it may not have been the rats at all but the cheese was better on the other end...
 
  • #24
jedishrfu said:
Also it may not have been the rats at all but the cheese was better on the other end...
Lol.
 
  • #25
AlephZero said:
I just think some people here have more work experience than others.
hey! what's that supposed to mean?! I know that in pre-modern japan, a disgracefully defeated feudal lord might be ordered to commit seppuku. Especially if he did not proof-read his proposal :)
 
  • #26
BruceW said:
hey! what's that supposed to mean?

Nothing except that some members of PF are more than twice as old as others. And there's a saying in my local dialect of English, "Them as lives longest sees most". (Or "those who have lived longer have seen more", if that doesn't translate into Japanese).
 
  • #27
ok, ok. I see the point. but there are those that live a long time without seeing much. (myself included). by the way, you mentioned Cambridge earlier in the thread. are you from UK? I'm from UK too. I feel I need to provide an old saying to prove this... how about: "he's going round the wrekin" meaning he's going the long way around of doing something.
 
  • #29
D H said:
Enigman said:
The importance of an E...
Even more important [...]

Evo said:
DH is right [...]

GWFNJ.gif


Guess who two aren't getting any of my votes in the member awards?
##\mathfrak Mr. \mathcal E##

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
P.S. dkotschessaa gets my votes as I owe him for the pic
 

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