Failure :(

Note to self: Don't go out to beer and tapas the night before a final if you want to pass the exam....

           Finals are over here, and grades are out. Overall I'm pretty pleased--in three out of four classes I managed similar grades to those at UCSB. Linguistics of the Golden Age, however, took me down. I guess everyone needs to fail a final exam sometime, right? I'm sort of kidding about my opening statement, though--I did study a lot for the test, and even if I holed myself up in my room reviewing the notes endlessly the night before, I don't think I would have done better on the final. The format and expectations for the exam were too unclear, and even after I asked the professor for help in office hours, my doubts weren't resolved.
          This is what upsets me so much about the Spanish education system. Four months of the semester are spent essentially doing nothing--sure, people attend class, but the information in a lot of my classes was either incredibly repetitive, useless, inapplicable to literally ANYTHING in life, or scattered and hard to follow. So you get used to the idea that education here is really easy and sort of something that is taken lightly, and then BAM, the professors suddenly have sky-high expectations for the final exam. I know that this is true in the U.S. too--often times the final is one of the only scores in the class that determines your final grade. But at least in that case it is made clear throughout the entire course what is expected, and how seriously students and professors take their work.
         And yes, maybe I deserved a 4 out of 10 on the final. But then there's the issue of how the professor revealed the grades two days after we all handed in 20 page papers and each wrote at least 4 pages for the exam. And there are fifty of us in the class. You don't have to be a genius to realize that with those odds, he barely read any of the papers or the exams. So he essentially skimmed some lines and assigned a grade. One of my friends even asked him if he read the work, and he told her, "If I read everything you wouldn't have you're grade until March. And I don't want to be here until March grading."
        Even failing the final, I still managed an OK grade because of my previous paper scores, and the UC's curving system for grades earned abroad. So I'm not writing this blog because I'm upset with my grade, more because I'm upset with the entire education system here. I'll agree that the U.S.'s system has some serious funding flaws, but you can really note the quality gap between the University of Granada and UCSB.

       Without even so much as a week off, new classes have started here. I think the classes this semester will be much more applicable to my interests and major. Here's to hoping! I'm taking: History of Modern Social and Political Movements in Spain; Linguistics Applied to the Teaching of Languages; Hablas Andaluzas (basically a class about dialects of Spanish in Andalucia); and Comparative Linguistics between Spanish and English.