grade whore

I finally got my grades from last semester. So much for my track record for excellence, I flunked two classes. Not that it matters since I took a bunch of extra classes (which is partly why I flunked the two). But it's kind of embarassing since one, on transition economies in post-Soviet countries, was related to my former degree, and the other, was Spanish. Hah!

For the rest, as you might imagine I kicked ass in classes in English, and relatively poorly in French ones. I don't think it's because of the language so much as the methodology. For this one professor we had from UC Santa Barbara all we had was an essay to write, and I'd had 10 years of practice on how to write this sort of thing. I also happened to love the class, but that's also related to methodology.

Same thing for the transition economics class, except theh professor was French, and despite writing in English it's just a different way of presenting things. I was also writing a 30 page analysis of India's financial system reforms at the same time so I had different priorities. Potentially bad priorities: the class I flunked was worth twice as much as the finance class. So overloading on extra classes saved my ass, or it made life overly difficult for the ones I had to take. Whoops.

As further proof of the importance of methodology and teaching style, my research partner Marguerite did great in the typically French classes and relatively poorly in the classes with Anglo imperialists. So maybe it's nationalism? Grade inflation? Meh ...

One final detail: I barely passed the ridiculous multiple choice exam for this one terrible class we had with about 10 professors. The essay part in English, though, went well.

It's a good thing grades don't really matter at this level.