First-Year, First-Semester Finals!!

Programming Just Had to Cost Me a Perfect GPA, But... Programming

88. Haha. An overall mark of 88....

I knew as soon as the final ended that I'd got two conceptual multiple-choice questions wrong, and that my programming mark was doomed. But seeing that overall 88 still broke me... Sad for a whole day.
But so what? What can I say?....

I'm only a first-year. It doesn't matter... does it?

Maybe I've carried my high-school mindset into university and become one of those students caught up in the cult of achievement...
So what if I didn't get full grade points? I keep asking myself that.....
I'm at university now. In theory, grades shouldn't be how I judge myself... Besides, people have already told me 88 is a very good mark...
My perfectionism always acts up at times like this. When an assessment system tells me I'm not at the front, not among the very best—even if I'm always somewhere in the upper-middle range—I keep feeling that I'm not good enough, not perfect enough....
I'm comforting myself. I tell myself I'm only in my first year. I can easily close this little gap; it isn't some impassable chasm. Everything is still possible.
But I also feel I don't actually need comforting. I could finish the exams, throw all that testing behind me, and focus on things that interest me... University isn't secondary school. I don't need to sit another gaokao or high-school entrance exam. I don't have to be sad about grades. What if I never close that gap? If I can't get recommended for postgraduate admission, I'll take the entrance exam. If I don't want to do that, I'll try the selected-graduate route into civil service or the civil service exams. If those don't interest me, I'll simply find a job and earn money. What I'm trying to say is, why am I still trapped in grades? Why am I upset about not scoring well—or even just not getting full grade points?

I got the highest score on the programming course project. The component marked 92 should actually have been 96; I shared four of my points with a teammate. That was where I gained the most. This library management system I learned to write myself, with AI building the framework and me adding features and fixing bugs. From that project, I learned how to use Git, how to write a report in Markdown, a little CMake. I even wanted to try an SQL database. I worked out some potential Chinese-text compatibility issues across environments, then followed my interests into making this blog... Small things, perhaps, but in practical terms, they're far more useful than carrying a laptop into class, sitting there half-awake while the teacher talks through a heap of material, staring into space, then teaching myself by grinding through an online judge.
I've already learned what I wanted to learn. All I'm asking myself is: why am I upset over a grade?
Maybe I just want to tell myself I'm good. But I should already know that I am... I don't need perfect grades to prove it. Under all this pressure to achieve, I don't need to—and shouldn't— turn university into another high school spent worrying over scores. Programming is something I've always wanted to learn. My interest will keep me moving forward.

It's all settled now.
I didn't fail. I don't have to retake it. I've finished this course. I can move on to the next.
Focus. Next subject. Settle down.

Revising for Finals Is Exhausting!! Calculus

Haha, but! It's over!!

Calculus is so hard. I made calculation errors even on things I knew!! I even instinctively set up the particular solution to a differential equation wrong!! I left a term out of an integral!! (That integral was so hard!!) I forgot how to find an asymptote on the very first question!! And I've had enough of that stupid physics problem disguised as an integration question!! I wrote down an expression, but I think something was wrong with it!!

The exam may have gone like absolute crap, but it's over!!

If the exam is over, that means everything is over! Right!!!!
Everyone says calculus was hard, so I feel better. I'll be at peace with this one.

I know my maths has always been this way. It's been a pile of crap since middle school... But in university calculus, once you understand the concepts, doing the exercises is much of a muchness. There aren't so many problems requiring inventive thinking, which actually makes it a little easier. The only real difficulty might be not knowing how to manipulate an integrand...

I don't know whether my mathematical reasoning is weak or what. I struggle to turn a problem into mathematics unless I've practiced lots of similar questions and can follow their approach... Thankfully, at university that's enough to get through the finals.
That's precisely why I don't think I'm strong at maths... But it doesn't mean I'm weak at it. If it's a calculation problem I know how to tackle, I can work out the reasoning. I solved both the indefinite and definite integrals everyone said were hard this time—though I left out a constant term in the indefinite integral, which left me speechless at myself. I don't know what sort of mathematical ability that counts as....
Not especially suited to applying maths or devising new solutions, but pretty good as a problem-solving calculator!

Let that be that. Everyone in the group chat is posting “Teacher, I'm hopeless, please save me.” I didn't. I did the sums, and what I got right should be worth 60 marks anyway... No need to plead over scores. What teacher sees a student on 59 and doesn't rescue them with a few more coursework marks? After all, a student failing creates so much extra trouble...
I'll wait quietly.

What If You Teach Yourself All Term and Discover You Know Nothing at Finals? Linear Algebra

It's okay. A linear algebra crash course will save your sorry life... I recommend Kuangkuang (框框老师)...

The Linear Algebra Final

At the start of term, the lecturer's thick rural Hunan accent hit me like a blow to the head. That was the spark.
The textbook was such a mess that I couldn't understand what it was talking about. That was the direct cause.
And so I went down the route of teaching myself all of linear algebra... Class? Thursday at eight in the morning. I didn't want to go in the first place, and then it was at eight. Not exactly motivating...
Every Wednesday night, I'd despair at the thought of Thursday's 8 a.m. linear algebra class.

Initially, I watched Yi Gaoshu (一高数)'s self-study course. The teaching was excellent, laying a solid foundation for my four-hour crash course... The only drawback might have been the limited range of question types, which left me mainly knowing how to use the formulas...
Later, feeling that I really didn't understand linear algebra, especially the chapter on vector spaces, I tried MIT professor Gilbert Strang's lectures to help... And yes, I understood. With GeoGebra's 3D calculator alongside them, I could see where that heap of seemingly arbitrary formulas came from. I even gained a faint sense of linear algebra as geometry, and understood matrices better...
Then I started doing past finals and sadly discovered that this wasn't much help for my exam.
I was understanding linear algebra. But the final told me I needed to solve questions, remember things to solve questions, transform them into familiar forms to solve questions.
Then I surrendered... Like countless last-minute crammers, I opened a four-hour crash course and started studying question types and techniques... Here are the scruffy traces of that struggle in my notes.
Thankfully, it ended well. Maybe I really was lucky. The linear algebra exam was easy. I finished an hour early—the questions were all types I'd seen in the crash course, so I worked very quickly—and spent the remaining hour recalculating determinants and matrix products, terrified of arithmetic mistakes... After going through them ten times and convincing myself they were right, I finally handed it in ten minutes early.

Maybe my performance in linear algebra was just like a line I saw: “A Chinese university student's finals are a semester of effort, a few days of anxiety, one day of memorization, and luck in the exam hall.”
Haha. Then I saw another: “The first seventeen weeks show you I'm a university student. Week eighteen shows you why.”

Revising a whole subject in one day is exhausting, though... Calculus finished at eleven, then I slept until two in the afternoon (that uniquely university-student love of sleep). Then I opened my phone, anxiously scrolled, saw someone recommend a course, and started watching at four. On and off, I studied until eleven that night...
Still, it's strange how much you can absorb from just five hours of lectures. Before studying, I was a noob who didn't even know how to solve a system of linear equations. Afterward, I could remind my roommates of things they'd missed in their revision... Pressure really is an indispensable force for getting lazy people moving.

About the Linear Algebra Lecturer...

Malice

Honestly, I resisted the lecturer's familiar, homely accent from the start... Classmates from other provinces immediately said they couldn't understand him. I could, but he reminded me of a primary-school maths teacher who taught in dialect. My maths grades had taken a sharp turn downward then, and the butterfly effect had gone on to affect my interest in maths... Add to that a first lesson spent reading from slides without explaining the principles, and my inability to understand where the determinants at the start of the textbook came from. After a whole class, I felt as if I'd learned nothing. I resisted it all. Dislike spread by association: I lost interest in linear algebra, felt that learning it was painful, wondered why the lecturer was like this, and developed a prejudice against him...
It wasn't just me. Everyone seemed to feel that way.
I often browse the campus marketplace and see people asking for help, including lots of posts about choosing lecturers. I saw someone asking for linear algebra lecturer recommendations. I was about to suggest someone I thought taught exceptionally well and explained things clearly (for anyone coming to HNU, that's Zhu Yusen), but then I saw people in the comments recommending my lecturer as if it were a joke... I felt conflicted. On one hand, I thought they were being cruel, recommending a lecturer whose speech people couldn't understand to someone asking for help. On the other, I'd already silently accepted the equation: this lecturer == a bad lecturer.
People can keep being shaped by public opinion. That's frightening.
At first, I only had a little distrust of him. Nothing serious; it didn't affect how I felt about coming to class. But when I saw everyone saying he was terrible, I let their opinions pull me along.
I joined the crowd passing judgment. My hostility grew.
I went with the flow and attacked him too. I complained to my roommates, directly and indirectly, about how bad he was and how he'd affected my learning... Even my motivation to attend class suffered. Seeing his name made me uncomfortable...

But was that really true? Was this lecturer really so awful? Was he the reason I couldn't answer the linear algebra questions at finals?

Arrogance makes you regress. It's a simple truth.

Waking Up

It all happened one morning. After New Year's Day, a roommate in another major suddenly asked me, “Did you know that linear algebra lecturer you complain about every day has died?”
It was so sudden. I wasn't prepared at all. As far as I knew, he'd just taken two weeks off. I hadn't known, or bothered to care, about his health.
The roommate who took the class with me said she'd noticed something was very wrong at his last lecture. Usually loud and startling, he'd sat on a stool beside the lectern the whole time, speaking so softly she could barely hear him. Everyone thought he'd simply caught the flu in flu season. It was normal. We all knew he'd return to teaching once he recovered, and we'd carry on teaching ourselves linear algebra while sitting through his lectures.

But that wasn't going to happen. The teaching assistant sent the official notice.

The moment I heard, I came to my senses.
I remembered what my roommate had told me: “I don't think Mr. Zhou is that bad, actually. He's very nice.” Before, blinded by my own arrogance, I hadn't taken it seriously. Now I could recall it perfectly.
Why?
I asked myself.
Maybe I'd woken up.
As if a bucket of cold water had been thrown over us, everyone began examining themselves. Maybe it was the convention of respecting the dead. Maybe we really recognized our past mistakes...
Whatever the reason, we'd all woken up.
Whatever the reason, Mr. Zhou was already gone.

People keep getting pulled along by public opinion. What breaks that pattern is often something as momentous as this, a matter of life and death.
Have your own judgment. Stay awake.
That was the lesson Mr. Zhou truly taught me. The only thing I really learned from my linear algebra lecturer, and perhaps the most important lesson of my life.

Finally, a tribute from one of his students.

May everyone be safe and well. May cancer never take another life.
Rest in peace, Mr. Zhou.