My cal I teacher was a total hardass with her quizzes and tests. The quizzes were mostly take-home but were ridiculous, and the tests always had too many problems that just seemed impossible. So I always ended up with a C or D on those assignments. However, the midterm was written by the program coordinator, and actually tested knowledge of the important topics instead of being overly hard. I got an A on that without breaking a sweat.
So that kept my grade in B territory, which was nice, but I wanted an A because it was a 4 hour class, weighting it a good bit. But no matter how much work I put into the quizzes and studying for tests I still kept getting Cs.
Before the final, though, she announced that she was going to put a review sheet online that would allow us to redeem 1/5 of the test points we missed in class if we did all of them and, presumably, got all of them right. But it was all or nothing. But when I did the math if I got those points back and got like a high A on the final, I could get an A in the class.
So the day before the final I literally spent all day on that sheet. I got down to question like 52 out of 54, and I was stuck. I could get to a certain point (basically all the actual calculus) before I got stuck on some really hard algebra stuff (trying to solve a cubic for zeroes). I was really upset because I was afraid not getting that one would nullify the full day's work I put into the thing. I still did the rest, hoping that maybe I'd get credit.
So I took it in to the final, and before I actually turned it in I asked some guys from class who said that she said that if we wrote how to solve it after the calculus, we'd get credit. So I erased a bunch of BS I had written on how to find the zeroes and just wrote in English how to do it.
I was pretty uncertain about a lot of problems on that exam, but two days later to my surprise I found a nice, shiny A on the webpage with my grade. I was ecstatic.
