Shields at 20%

So, I'm fucking up (by my standards) my Engineering class.

I just got my second quiz grade back, which was 7/10.  Now, it's a quiz, so that shouldn't be much of an issue, but I also made an idiotic mistake on the midterm and got an 80% (like, literally, flipped one sign on one problem and, as a result, lost 20% of the exam).

So, right now, I've actually got a B in the class.  88.33%.  Since I came back to school, I've never been this low in a class.  Further, the grading scale doesn't have much room for leeway: the midterm, quizzes, and final are, combined, 70% of the grade.  With only three quizzes, we only have one left (I got 100% on the first one).  I'm already at 95% with the homework itself, but that's also only 10% of the grade, so there's not a lot of leeway there.

If I get 100% on everything remaining until the final, I need an 88% on the final to get a 90% in the class.  Chances are that I'm not going to get 100% on everything.  So, really I need to get a mid to high A, if not a perfect score, on the final, or I get a B.

The class average right now is a 79.2%, so it's not like everyone's doing badly.  I'm just doing much, much worse than normal.  I think a big factor is simply that so many of the tests and quizzes are 2 or 3 problems: if I make even one mistake somewhere, that's a huge portion of the test down. Also, there is zero partial credit for anything; her philosophy (which is understandable) is that it's either right or its wrong.  So, for example, the one errant + sign for the midterm meant that my x-value was wrong but my y-value was correct; it doesn't matter that I then knew how to correctly calculate the total force and resulting angle for those given x and y; because the x-value was wrong, the force and angle were wrong.  So, out of 20 points, I lost 15 (3 out of 4).

With so few points per test or quiz, any mistake is magnified.  If I get another 7/10 on my third quiz, then I need a perfect score on the Final to get an A, even if everything else is perfect.  And chances are the final and the quiz will also be only a few questions each, which means even one small mistake will mean getting a B.

Heck, even the 88% on the final means likely missing only one part of one problem out of three or four.  For someone with ADHD and dyslexia, having essentially no tolerance for potential errors is essentially a recipe to fail.

The shitty part is that I'm usually the one helping everyone else get things right.  Conceptually, I understand this stuff more than most people.  But one errant plus sign and now who knows what I did on the quiz mean that I may blow my 4.0.  This quiz thing is even worse - I explicitly double-checked my answers.  The only thing I can think of is that a value she gave was meant to be for diameter rather than radius, which obviously would change a lot, but I swear she said it was radius in class (and the diagram itself was completely ambiguous).

This isn't the end of the world.  Life would go on.  But I really, really don't want to get my first (and even then hopefully only) B in a class that is intrinsic to my future career.  That's kind of a bad sign.  There's also a huge, huge impact psychologically to losing the "straight As" rank, not to mention what kind of impact it may have on transferring (my app is already in, but they still consider classes prior to actual admission).

I'll keep working for the A.  I just don't have much confidence in myself to get it at this point.  If I screw anything else up in the class at all, it won't be possible - and the odds are (especially based on history) that I'll screw something up.