Surfacing for a brief moment

I'm officially halfway through my finals and I'm officially exhausted. When I picked out my classes for this semester and saw the finals dates, I thought the finals were nicely spaced out and wouldn't present a problem. I didn't have any exams on the same day or any back-to-back exams, so I figured I would be fine. And, to be sure, I know people who have those killer back-to-back finals schedules, so I probably shouldn't be complaining. But, I do have two sets each of two exams within three days, and all the studying is definitely wearing on me.

So far this week I've had Evidence (on Monday) and Federal Income Tax (on Wednesday). I get a brief break and then I have IP on Saturday and Secured Credit next Monday. Bleah! Evidence and FIT were remarkably good experiences, insofar as taking a final exam can ever be a "good" experience. I felt like I knew how to answer all the questions and I didn't have any problems with time; I got to check over all my answers at least once during both exams. (And a good thing I did, too, because there were a couple of tricky questions I realized I had answered wrongly and I also found one instance where I just plain old filled in the wrong bubble on the scan-tron sheet.)

However, I have the feeling that IP and Secured Credit will be much less rosy experiences. For one thing, they are both supposed to be time-pressured (whereas Evidence and FIT definitely were not). And, my IP professor said he deliberately makes a hard test so he gets a nice curve. It's all multiple choice, too, so you can't make up for any questions you might get wrong because of time pressure or being bad a multiple choice by showing what you know in an essay. On the other end of the spectrum, Secured Credit is four short-answer questions and one longer essay. Despite what I just said about IP and no essay questions, here is where the open-ended, write-what-you-will format will probably bite me in the butt, because I'm definitely the least prepared for Secured Credit and could probably use the structure of a multiple choice test (pick one of these five answers) to help me along.

And in the midst of all this studying, I am reading knitting blogs and seeing all the beautiful knitting that other people are doing for holiday gifts or what have you, and I'm envious of the time that other people have to knit. So far my knitting has been severely limited to the time I'm on the bus, and since I'm knitting socks for GPG's Christmas present at the moment, it's slow going (he has big feet. Seriously big feet.). Once I finish exams on Monday I will have to knit like crazy to try and get the Chairwoman's present together. I haven't even started. I'm not sure if I'll have time to do it. Eek! GPG might have to wait for his socks.

Anyway . . . back to studying.