Midterm : First Blood

I had my statistical thermodynamics mid-term today. It wasn't as easy as I had been hoping, but I still think I did reasonably well. There were a grand total of 8 problems, and I totally choked on problems 3 and 4. Basically, I had to do this funky integral and failed to make a couple of logical connections regarding simplification, and also didn't notice that he had placed the solution to the most complicated piece of the intergral at the bottom of the test. *sigh* It didn't help that when I first tried to do the integral and ran into problems, I started to panic. My hands started shaking and I could literally feel the blood draining out of my face. It was nasty. So I skipped to the last three problems and did them quickly and easily enough that I started to calm down. I never did figure out how to do the integral but I figure I'll get some partial credit on those two problems since I think I showed that I knew how to solve the problem. Still, I was so annoyed once I had time to sit down after the test and go over the integral. At that point, I figured it out in about a minute.

So, the lesson learned here is that I need to not freak out on tests. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that my test-taking skills are going to need a bit of sharpening considering that I haven't taken a test since 1998, with the exception of the GRE.