Gut course

Back in late January, I noted that I had just completed the first of ten programming assignments for my VB.NET II course. Monday night, 10 weeks or so later, I finished the last one -- or, to be more precise, the one after the last one; we got an optional Extra Credit problem worth 2 points (the normal assignments are worth 6 each) that I figured I might as well do.

With the ten regular assignments worth a total of 60 points, and the first exam worth 20, I now have a total of 83.7 points out of 80. See, two of the 6-point assignments each had a possible bonus point, which I scored. Sadly, I got docked 0.3 points on one of the early assignments because the instructor claimed that one of the buttons on the form "served no purpose". Which wasn't true; it actually provided a useful feature that made the app work better than the problem (which as written made little sense) called for, which I tried to explain, but evidently I wasn't supposed to innovate: I was supposed to cough up a solution that did exactly what the problem said, no less and certainly no more. Since my rationale fell on deaf ears, I decided 0.3 points wasn't worth getting exercised over (even if it was 5% of the grade on that assignment).

So now there's just one 20-point, 40-question test to go before school's out. With my extra credit points, I could get 7 questions wrong and still have a total of 100.2 points for a 100-point course. Or even get 27 of 40 questions wrong and still get an A!

Still, I'm hoping to end up with a final score of 103.7 out of 100. Even though the school doesn't give A+ grades, maybe it will make the instructor feel just a bit petty over nicking me for three tenths of a point for being creative.