My worst fears confirmed

OK... today I am ready to talk about how much exams suck.

You prep all summer. You are as prepared for the first day of class as a Kenyan marathoner is for the starting gun. You work 10 to 12 hour days, 6 1/2 days a week for three months. You completely color in almost 2000 pages of textbooks with a rainbow of highlighters. You take enough notes that it takes 5 minutes to transfer all of them from your laptop to your memory stick. You labor endlessly to create 30-page outlines for each class of all of the material, synthesized into an easy-to-memorize format. You spend two psychotic sleepless weekends writing the take-home exams for LRW. Your days now have two highlights: the 20 oz coffee that starts you up in the morning, and the beer and Tylenol PM you take to go to sleep. You stop shaving and showering. You order pizza for breakfast. The last three weeks are a forced march of studying.... it doesn't stop, there are no days off, only procrastination.

And then... the exams.

Three hours of madly typing. Trying to get down more information than can be put down in three hours. You ignore the voice in your head that tells you are on the wrong track, are discussing the wrong issues, and are getting a C for your stubbornness. You try to pretend that you're not scared of losing out to the stoner who didn't do any of the work all semester but just memorized someone else's outline last week. You just write and write and write.

Then it's over. You go home and put that class' books away, take all the charts down from the walls, and start to get your materials ready for the next exam. But you start to think: how the hell is the professor going to read those 80 exams and decide which are the 5-10% that deserve an A? How can these hundreds of hours of work, the most you have worked in your life, be ultimately measured by three hours of frantic writing?

And then.... a real law professor reveals your worst fear: the secret curve grading method.

One more left: Contracts on Saturday. Then we drink.

(Thanks to Otherwise Occupied for the link!)