Odds not looking good for stats

One of the nice things about Kenan-Flagler is that regardless of how poorly I do in a particular class, I have the comfort of knowing that the professor can only give an "L" (low pass) to a maximum of 5% of his students. In a class of 281 students, that means at most, 14 students will get an "L." I have always looked upon this arrangement as a safety net of sorts, almost like social security, an insurance of last resort, that I really have to be a major putz to get an "L" in a class.

After this morning's statistics final, I am going to have to count on the this so called safety net. I was not doing well in statistics to begin with. I performed below the mean on the "quiz" (it was really a midterm) and was lost (in a secular sense) throughout a good part of the second half of the Mod. As I was studying last night, I decided that instead of studying to understand the concepts, I was only going to study past years' finals to understand how to do the problems. I took comfort in knowing that other students I saw studying last night were almost equally clueless and that, as my professor said during the first week of class, (paraphrasing) "there are only so many different ways we can ask the same questions over and over again."

But the exam this morning was harder than any of those given in the past years. In addition, there were conceptual short answers questions that I could not answer because I studied the old exams without actually understanding the underlying mechanics of the math involved. Throughout the exam, I kept thinking about my accounting professor's ongoing joke about what happens when you cross an elephant with a rhino. There were a couple of questions where I was really tempted to reference the joke in my answer because "elephrino" anything about the relationshp between SST and SSR in a standard multiple time series regression. (not an actual exam question)