First Exam

    I decided to take my modern history class here because the first day, the professor spoke a lot slower than in other classes, she was willing to help us foreigners, and said that as long as she knows we are trying, we won't fail. This is one of my classes as the local university with other local students. The problem is, there are four different professors for this class, and I haven't seen the one from the first class since the first day of class. And not all of the other professors are as willing to help as she was. So this class has turned out a little harder than i thought it would be. The other professors speak really fast and go through their Power Points too fast to write down notes. Actually, they often reprimand us for taking notes and tell the class simply to listen because the Power Points are online. This had made studying hard because I don't have many notes to compare to the Power Points when I download them from online.
     The other day after class, a group of us went to the cafeteria with some students from class, and they had a stack of papers three inches high, and explained that these were the readings for the midterm we had today. This was a week ago, so me and the five other international kids in the class went to go wait for an hour at the photo copier to get the readings and divide them between us to possibly get all of them read within a week. This was a great strategy because I ended up reading 40 pages instead of a couple hundred, and we gave each other summaries.
     However, the readings were still pretty intricate and repetitive, and as a result I've been using Wikipedia for a lot of studying help. I've been brushing up on my knowledge of the Renaissance and religion by reading the articles on Wikipedia.
     So we had our midterm today and it was 5 short answer questions. I know I missed a full 20% because I didn't know anything about one of the topics. But I only need a 6 out of ten to pass. The grading scale is a little different here. Students are graded on a 1 to 10 scale. A 6 would be about equivalent to a B- or B.
     I'm also allowed to retake the test if I didn't pass, but I'm hoping I did well enough on the other questions to pass.  I was also expecting the test to be two hours, so I was taking my sweet time looking up words in my dictionary and planning out my response. So I barely got to finish when I realized we only had one hour. Then we had two hours of class after which was brutal because all I wanted to do was sleep.