Sorry I haven't posted in a while. I've been spending the last two weeks finishing up the last assignments for this trimester, making "graphic organizer"/note things to study from, and studying like crazy. Last Friday, this Monday, and this Tuesday, we had exams. No classes, just two or three 1 1/2 hour exams each day.
God I worked and studied so hard. I mean, I always work and study hard, because getting good grades is just something that I kind of have to do...not like my parents force me to get A's or anything..I guess I'm kind of lucky in that way. But I do it for me. I do it because I want to learn, because I want to get good grades, because it makes me feel good, and because I'm trying to get into one of the most prestigious universities in the continental US and quite frankly, the world: Stanford University.
The first day of exams, I took the tests for Spanish Literature and Latin. The second day, I took the tests for History and English(obviously that one was RIDICULOUSLY easy). And the third day, I took the tests for Economy and Philosophy.
Now mind you, these are not tests where there are four choices to choose from and maybe a couple short open-ended questions. They don't do tests like that here...they're too "easy" although in the US, like let's be real, they're not always easy. Anyway, they give you a topic and you have to write everything that you've learned about that topic in paragraph form. They give you blank pages and you just write away for the entire class. Now mind you, I'd be pretty good at that in English because I've always been a strong writer. However, having to do it in Spanish...it's torture. When I study, I not only have to study the content but how it's written in the book or in my notes so I know how to write it on the test. It's quite a lot of work.
But for what it's worth, for only being here for two months, I'm doing SO well. I thought I would be failing my classes for the first few months, but I'm pulling extremely high grades, a lot of times higher than my classmates. And while I'm sure most of that is from the fact that I probably study a lot longer and harder than them, I'm still pretty dang proud of myself.
So, the results...all the scoring here is out of 10, not done to a 0-100% scale, though it's obviously super easy to do the math to see what that would be. Anywho...the scores of the tests... Literature : 9.4 // Latin : 10 // History : 9.4 // English : haven't gotten the scores but I'm gonna go ahead and assume 10 // Economy : 9.5 // Philosophy : 9.6.
I'm literally so happy. We get our official grades for the trimester next Friday, and I know for a fact that I have good grades. Of course the first exams I took had lower scores, though they were still pretty good scores. And the class grade is the exams and classwork put together, just like in America. So I guess we'll see!!
If you plan on going abroad, you need to know that YES it's a lot of work. There will be days when you're so frustrated because you're trying to cram in the same amount of information as the rest of the students, only the catch is that you're not nearly on the same language level as them. You're going to have to study hard and work hard, but it's possible to get good grades. Don't tell yourself "I'm going to fail" like I did, because I worried about it SO much before leaving the US. And now I'm here and pulling basically the same grades as in the US. So if your grades are important to you, it IS possible to keep them up, I promise you..I mean look at me, I've done it. You could too!!!
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