74%. Okay...

I got a 74% or 37/50.  I'll admit that I wasn't nearly as surprised as some other people seem to have been with their scores.  I'm a bit behind on the homework and my friends have talked about how much harder the test is than they expected, and that their scores were a surprise to them.  I cannot say that I'm overly disappointed or shocked.  I just sort of... am.  And from what I can tell, the score really isn't that bad.  But I digress.

There were a few minutes of frustration, however, as I looked through the correct answers, reasoning my way through what made them correct (and occasionally referring to the given explanations.  Far too often, I find myself thinking that I over-thought a situation.  At least twice, my original instinct was the right answer, but when I thought it through, it seemed to obvious or too shallow.  I suppose I am expecting more out of everything than necessarily exists.  I know this is a problem of mine, though, and I plan on addressing it accordingly.

Funnily enough, I am also rather amused by my results.  Going in, I had expectations about which passages I would be able to answer well and which ones I would make a mess of.  While some of them were correct (I know I am bad at analyzing writing similar to that of the last passage), I had not expected my answers for the first poem to go so well, nor my answers for the excerpt of Pride and Prejudice to go so poorly.  I have often believed that my understanding of authors' meanings in poetry is a little different from their original intentions, simply because there are different interpretations (which, I suppose, also means that everybody is correct, but I'm not quite sure what that means in terms of multiple choice questions with one right answer and four wrong answers).  However, for both poems, I did considerably better than I had expected.  On the other hand, I expected the excerpt from a book that I have always enjoyed reading to have gone much better than it did.  Having read the entire novel multiple times, I was confident that I was able to tell what Austen's intentions and messages were.  There, I think, rests my problems; I was over-confident and brought in information that was better implied in other parts of the novel, that reading the rest of the book would make visible in the first passage.  I think it is a good thing I did badly on this; I will definitely learn from the experience for potential future situations like this one.

And I think this is getting a bit longer than the original assignment meant for this post to be, so I should probably stop soon.  I guess, overall, I'm not disappointed.  Actually, part of me is pretty excited; there's a lot yet that I have to learn and I'm looking forward to learning it.