Finals are over!! I took my last final last tuesday, and went home right after that. Tbh they went… miserably…
Not “I failed everything and my life is ruined” miserably, but the kind of miserable where you walk out of the room and immediately start replaying every question in your head like a crime reconstruction.
My horror story of an exam:
The DS110 final in particular is still haunting me like a ghost that refuses to cross over.
The DS110 final deserves its own section purely because of how offensively ridiculous it was. I went into that class knowing the material. I did the homework, I did the projects, and everything we actually covered made sense. I wasn’t worried about the content itself I was worried about the fact that my professor spent the entire semester saying absolutely nothing of substance and then told us, with a straight face, to “study everything.”
And then the final happened.
Looking at that exam was like staring directly into the void of generative AI and having it stare back with 70 multiple-choice questions it hallucinated during a fever dream. None of it matched our lectures, (because there were no lectures.) None of it matched the homework. Half the questions looked like they were pieced together from scraps of unrelated textbooks, package documentation, and whatever the algorithm decided it wanted to make up.
You could practically see the AI fingerprints on it, the phrasing that tries to sound academic but means nothing, the trick questions that rely on definitions we never learned, the terminology that bounced between three different subfields like the model couldn’t decide which dataset it was pulling from. It felt like someone asked ChatGPT to “make a DS110 exam but make it hard,” and then didn’t even skim it before uploading…
The whole thing felt like an insult to the hours I actually spent learning the material he was supposed to teach. I’m pretty sure I still passed, because I genuinely do understand data mining basics, but that exam was not a reflection of anything except a professor who offloaded his job onto an LLM and called it a day.
What else I’ve Been doing:
Free time! Finally! has been thrust upon me as I have been momentarily unshackled from the chains of school. I finished persona 5 Strikers, redesigned my fursona, and bought some commissions of him. I painted a watercolor mountain to give to my hairdresser for his birthday which is the next time I see him in January.
Outside the screen, life has been pretty simple. No D&D this week because Lawrence had finals and was being dramatic about studying ahead. I’ve got a road trip with Kia this weekend to their hometown, which I’m actually excited for. I need to reset my brain somewhere that isn’t my desk or a testing center. Hopefully we’ll have D&D this coming Sunday, if everyone is alive by then, because I’ve missed slipping into a world where my biggest concerns are bad dice rolls and morally questionable NPCs instead of learning outcomes and exhausted professors.
For now, though, I’m just relieved to be on the other side of finals. The work is done. The grades will fall where they fall. My DS110 final can stop replaying in my head any moment now, preferably. I survived the semester, which feels like an achievement all on its own.