SF Science Exam Results

My second year exam results came out two days ago (Friday) during work, meaning I got very little work done that day. I was very very nervous about results -- worried about failing Chemistry and about getting a 2.1 or 2.2 that would leave me unsure about whether I'd get into Genetics.

Luckily, things went a lot better than I'd been expecting! My overall overall result was 86% which is a high first.

The highlights for me were:

• high first overall
• a first in every module
• a first in every exam
• getting high firsts even in the exams for essay subjects
• not failing Chemistry
• getting 100% in the Multivariable Calculus exam

Predictions:

Chemistry: 58%*

Cell Structure: 80%

Metabolism: 80%

Evolution: 65%

Microbiology: 80% (was very doubtful about this one)

Ecology: 65%

Behaviour: 65%

Genetics: 80%

Immunology: 80%

Multivariable Calculus: 97%

Statistics: 92%

Green highlight = prediction was lower than result

Orange highlight = prediction was higher than result

Results: (black bar shows First line)

I made these nice graphs using R and ggplot2.

Module	Overall	Exam	CA	Overall  Grade
Chemistry	79	80.83	73.61	I
Cell Structure	93	92.5	95.3	I
Metabolism	83	78.75	94.06	I
Evolution	90	93.5	79.33	I
Microbiology	87	88.3	85	I
Ecology	80	85	66.21	I
Behaviour	95	95.5	95.3	I
Genetics	79	77.5	85.4	I
Immunology	83	79	96	I
Multivariable Calculus	98	100	87.53	I
Statistics	92	93	88	I

Genetics, weirdly enough as it's my chosen specialisation, is the only one where I did worse than I predicted (I predicted 80% and got 79%). Bit worrying but it's still a fairly good grade.

*After the exam I calculated this three ways: ‘Realistically but Conservative’, ‘Optimistically’, and ‘Negatively’ (the last one to see if I was likely to fail). I came up with 58, 71 and 51 respectively. Even my optimistic one, which I thought was far too optimistic, turned out not to be optimistic enough.

I got the same mark overall in my scariest subject (Chemistry) as my chosen moderatorship subject (Genetics), and even did worse in the exam in Genetics. To be fair, Genetics is an essay subject so they mark harder, but still disappointing from the Genetics perspective but great from the Chemistry perspective. Also, I did well in Evolution and that's an important part of Sophister Genetics. I was also disappointed in my Metabolism mark; I only got 79 in the Metabolism exam after using a Metabolism essay to get Schols back at Christmas, so I don’t know what happened there.

I’m not sure how good my grade is compared to the rest of the Genetics applicants; I know there’s a prize for the Genetics students who do well but I’m not sure if that’s for doing well overall or in Genetics and I didn’t do that well in Genetics, but maybe 79 would rank high, I don’t know.

I was very happy with my marks overall - 86 is a good mark, and there were some very nice surprises - especially in Chemistry, but also in Evolution, Behaviour, Microbiology and Stats. I was really impressed to have gotten grades above 90 in an essay exam, as happened in Cell Structure & Function and Evolution. There were definitely some shenanigans with Behaviour - my CA mark was 62% when the provisional marks were released but 95.3% by the time the final results came out, which is odd. 

I tried to do something I saw the Biology admin do at the start of the year, find the correlation between CA and Exam result for each of my exams, but that didn't really work with my marks; they were too clustered near the top I think, and once I restricted the bounds there was only a very small correlation of about 0.12. So I guess it works better applied to the whole class, maybe with a wider range of results. 

It was super cool to get 100% in one of my exams, Multivariable Calculus; especially after getting 56% and 59% in my maths exams last year, getting 100% and 93% is pretty cool. Learning! Improvement! Overall, my grade went up 24 points from last year to this year, from 62% to 86%. I'm proud of that. 

It was partly because I moved into a subject I like, and partly because I changed how I approached college and started sitting up front, asking questions, taking notes and writing them up right after the lecture. I'm proud of myself, and it also feels very satisfying because the college admin wouldn't let me move into 2nd year biology with no 1st year or Leaving Cert biology (I had to get the Students Union to argue my case, thank you Alice, but I worked hard like I said I would and did it and got Schols and a high first in the summer exams. A year of continuous hard work later I can finally relax. I did it!!!