Dio: It's Finals Week

So, if the title hasn't given it away yet, it's finals week, which means this is that last chance for me to see if I can get high passes in any of my subjects. Time to actually cover some academic topics.

1. Grading

I never explained this clearly, but grading at my school for the first semester of freshman year is strange. Since we're all making the transition from high school to college, and my school is known for its notorious workload, for the first semester, instead of receiving letter grades, we get High Pass, Pass, or No Pass. A high pass is equivalent to an A, a pass is a B-C, and a no pass is everything below that. Next semester we get letter grades like everyone else, which is something I'm worried about, but this semester we have what we call "pass/fail".

2. Finals

Now that we've covered grading, let's talk about finals. Finals here is very different from most other schools. Actually, exams here are very different from most other schools. Since my school operates under a very strict honor code (we are encouraged to self-report anything that we do that breaks the rules), most of our exams are take-home. This means we have a certain amount of time to finish them in any setting we want, whether it be in the privacy of our dorm room, under a tree outside, or at the library. Teachers also allow us to listen to music during the exam, as long as it doesn't break the honor code. It's quite nice, having teachers treat you like the responsible adults you soon will be.

3. The upcoming holiday schedule

So right after finals are the holidays. This also means that we won't be posting as often as we would normally, since we'll be busy meeting up with each other, having sleepovers, goofing off, doing a project at some company, learning R and VBA, etc. I'm assuming that we'll have more concrete information when we meet up again, and I guess one of us will post then.

See you all in 2016. Dio signing off.