Arithmetic

What is the school semester without a test rant!! Yes, even on this very last semester of mine, even though only 3 out of my 5 classes actually have midterms/finals, even though all 3 of those classes only has ONE midterm the ENTIRE SEMESTER... we still can't have a school semester without a rant about midterms!!! But HEY!! It's the LAST SEMESTER SO THAT MEANS THE LAST RANT ON (school) TESTS!!! REJOICE (until I start complaining about GREs and graduate applications)!!!!

Understandably there have been rants in this blog that have dealt with errors, confidence, and other extraneous material relating to reasons why a test score would be lower than it appeared to have been. In particular the mere concept of arithmetic errors seems to be one of the most influential and annoying reasons a test score may be lowered. At first, this seems trivial. After all, why mark a student down when he forgets to put a minus sign instead of a plus sign in the very last equation of his problem, making him off by only a small amount? It would seem unfair...

However, if relating to the problems addressed in real life, perfection, in all sorts, is desperately needed to avoid serious errors. Relating to experiences in lab, perhaps one small miscalculation doesn't seem much in one part of the experiment, but if in the end it causes a large variation in your data, rendering it unusable, that "small" calculation isn't looking so small either. There are other stories people have constantly noted, such as the collapse of a bridge because of a misestimation, computer programs misfunctioning, etc... the list goes on. Therefore getting marked down is quite an accurate representation of the types of problems one can encounter in real life.
It's always particularly difficult,though, when you have so many lines and lines of equations to calculate and you err in one line. In general one always feels that for the most part it seems alright and doesn't need to be redone. Even if one tries to redo it, they will likely just follow their own equations and say "yes that makes sense" although if they truly look into it, it doesn't make sense. Its a sense of confidence that is unneeded. And I believe I had in the past mentioned something on confidence and how it makes people err more (well, actually maybe that's just me). And I think if I continue talking like this I'll be getting nowhere so I'm going to cut this short now.

GRE'S ARE NEXT, PREPARE YOURSELVESSSSS