Wonderful Test Scores

Friday the 9th, I took my second Intro to Psychology exam. I had done about 3 or 4 hours of study for the exam, but I had been hoping to do more, like 6 hours, and nearly one hour of the study had been last minute, which had not been my plan.

The psychology professor, Dr. Melanie Roudkovski, or Dr. R as she signs her name on emails and invites us to address her, is very nice at tests. The exams are about 50 questions long, all multiple choice, answered on a Scantron, except for the 5 point extra credit question which answered on the question sheets. So, it's theoretically possible to get 110% on a test, or at least to redeem up to 5 wrong answers.

For this last test, I checked all the uncertain problems after answering all the problems that I was sure of the answer to, and figured out the most likely answers to most of those, and made best guesses at the rest. By the end, I was confident in the answers to all but ten of the problems, and figured that I ought to get more than one out of four of the uncertain problems right.

I also did my best at the extra credit question, which was totally by hand. The challenge was to find an example of classical conditioning in my life. Classical conditioning is learning to associate something neutral, called a conditioned stimulus, with something called an unconditioned stimulus, that naturally evokes a response, or an unconditioned response, until there is a conditioned response to the conditioned stimulus identical to the unconditioned response to the unconditioned stimulus. The first example in the textbook when we learned about these was dogs hearing sounds or seeing something before they were given food, and starting to salivate upon hearing or seeing those things without any food present.

So, my example of classical conditioning was how association of sweets with seizures may have had a part in making me dislike things that taste too sweet.

I don't know yet exactly how many questions I got right and wrong and what score the extra credit got, but I have seen my total score, which is 51 out of 50. So, now that I'm above 100% on this test, I take notice that it could have been even better, but I will try to repress feelings of discontent with the past and push on for the future.

10/14/09 Accuracy Update: In class this morning we were given our tests back. I had noticed during the test that there were 54 questions as opposed to 50 on the first test, and I had been somewhat curious about that. It was revealed in class that 4 of the questions were not counted - the first 4 each person got wrong. So, I got full credit for the extra credit, I got 8 questions out of 54 wrong, and then 4 was subtracted from the numerator and the denominator of the fraction I got wrong.

I have such a nice teacher.