by Evan Perez

2/16/2023

English 110

The City College of New York

Professor Vicars

Failure Written Narrative 

DISCLAIMER: This is a narrative essay, therefore, the events written about in this essay may or may not be fabricated, fake, or greatly exaggerated for narrative effect. I do not condone academic dishonesty or mischievous activities surrounding academic integrity. 

The definition of success and failure varies from person to person. For me, success is wanting to do something and just doing it. If you want something, you will prepare for it and take time out of each day to inch yourself closer to doing what you want, you are in control of the outcome. However, I do believe there are some moments in life when the outcomes are truly out of your control, even if you are prepared. The story I will tell is about one of those times.

Freshman year, Spring semester of 2020, right before the pandemic closed down everything. Having passed Calculus 1, the next course in my curriculum was Calculus 2. Calculus is hard enough by itself, but Calculus 2 is another level of difficulty due to the fact that there are a lot more concepts and complicated techniques introduced. Having been in a big study group going into Calculus 2, the first exam was a breeze, the only disappointment I had was being two points shy of a 90 percent. I had developed great study habits thanks to my study group, and I felt like a champ. Coming out of the first exam, I knew I was going to have to put some serious work in to get that 90 percent on the midterm. What could go wrong?

 In Calculus 1, my study group had made it a habit to visit our Teaching Assistant to ask questions on harder problems. This same Teaching Assistant was also there for our Calculus 2 class, holding office hours as usual and getting to know us well. He saw that our group liked to go to him a lot, so he held public study sessions before the exams. These study sessions were held in the evening, the week before the exams. During these study sessions, the TA would go over difficult problems and highlight the main idea, how to recognize the problems, and the appropriate technique to solve them. The TA made these difficult concepts that we spent hours studying over so simple and cookie-cutter-like, we exalted him, he was a godsend. After doing well on our first Calculus 2 exam, we still studied like normal, taking time at the end of the day to pull out the mobile whiteboards and go to town on practice problems. From integrals containing trigonometric functions, partial fraction decomposition, and integrating by parts, we spent a couple of hours each day, even staying up until 3:00 AM on some nights, making sure we knew our Calculus 2 fundamentals. We worked on our studies a lot, but we knew that the weight of having to freak out about the midterm would be lifted off of us after the next study session, as long as we were prepared for it. The next study session went like the first, very well put together and it cleared up a lot of the questions and confusion from our studies. We even went over a possible bonus question since the professors like to put one at the end of the exam. We walked out of the auditorium, the cold, February airlifted the hot breaths coming from our laughter and sighs of relief. “Ahh, this exam is gonna be easy!” my friend exclaimed, “let’s go get ice cream!”. 

The day of the exam was still a nerve-racking one despite our confidence, the material we had covered was quite tricky, and small mistakes could lead to big consequences point-wise. It was Friday, February 7th, at 5:30 pm, thirty minutes before the exam. My group and I were walking toward the testing auditorium when suddenly a friend of mine named Abby ran into us in a panic. “They changed the exam! They changed the exam!” she exclaimed, elaborating that the original exam that was prepared for us to take had been switched out for something new entirely. How could this be though?  Was this even true? How did my friend know this information so quickly? What was going on?

Friday, February 7th, 4:30 pm, Abby is sitting in her Calculus 2 drill session, a scheduled part of the course where a teaching assistant goes over topics covered in the actual lecture. “Any questions before your midterm?” the TA asks. Silence falls upon the room, but just a moment, a tiny moment before the TA dismisses class, a careless student raises his hand and asks the TA to go over a question, a particular question that was covered in the study session the week prior by my group’s TA, the godsend. Abby’s TA is different from my group’s TA and has no idea what has been covered during these study sessions held by my group’s TA. “Sure!” the TA responded, walking over to the student’s desk and picking up his notes to get a better idea of what is being asked. The TA lays her eyes upon the paper, slowly going through the lines to understand the problem until she stops. “Hold on.” she murmurs as her expression smears from joyful to concerned. Frozen in angst, sudden dread capes over the entire room as the TA flips the page over to reveal more equations and notes, turning concern into shock. The TA storms out of the room without a word, straight toward the office of the professor she works under, the Calculus 2 professor. 

Friday, February 7th 5:00 pm, David is taking his Calculus 2 midterm. He’s enrolled in the accommodation testing center, so he started his exam earlier along with some of the other calculus 2 students who have testing accommodations. The exam is going very well, just like what he studied and almost exactly like what the study session covered. He is halfway done with the exam with plenty of time to spare for checking answers, another A+ in the grade book it looks like. He hasn’t even considered looking at the bonus question that we get on every exam, not that he’ll need it judging by the way the exam is going so far. The exam room door flies open, David’s Calculus 2 professor barges in, furious. After loudly whispering something to the testing administrator, the administrator looks up and yells “Pass your papers up, there’s been a change in the exam. You will take the exam at a later date.” Confused, David walks out of the building, trying to think of what could have happened. As he’s walking he bumps into an equally confused Abby.

(Present) “So those practice problems from the study session…they were straight from the midterm exam we were supposed to take?” I asked Abby, who was still standing in front of us with a worried look. Confirming the unbelievable, it was also revealed that the TA that held our study session was to be terminated from this position as a teaching assistant after the exam was finished. The academic crime he was to be charged with: Distribution of sensitive exam material to calculus students. No wonder we thought we were doing so well, we were just studying the exams, the realization fell upon me and my group as we tried to process everything and juggle test anxiety. The time we were supposed to take the exam was 6:00 pm, we didn’t get any emails from our Calculus 2 professors saying anything about a reschedule so we proceed to the auditorium. Once we got there, the news of the events that took place spread like wildfire. Hundreds of anxious calculus students murmured and chatted in the crowded lobby, my group and I amongst them. We knew this was not gonna be good. 

As the auditorium doors opened, everyone slowly shambled in as if resisting to enter the gates of hell, paying for our deeds with academic damnation. The four horsemen of the calculus apocalypse stood at the end of the room, each professor carrying wicked smiles and hidden behind them against the wall, their torture plaything, our TA, “the godsend”. As if lining up in church pews to pray for mercy, we took our seats in the cramped rows and pulled out the tiny desks that came with each seat. After everyone was settled in, the exams were passed out, vibrant orange packets spread across the rows reluctantly one by one as if to be some terrible biohazard. “My exam packet is warm…” a girl timidity said aloud. These exams were fresh out of the printers, the professors spared no expense in getting these new exams out to us, the students. This was it, the new midterm, at least I studied right?

Nothing could have prepared me for what was printed on those sheets of paper. Looking down at the text, I tried to piece together a way to approach the problem, but after a minute or so of confusion, I flipped to the next one, thinking I’d just come back to it after finishing the rest of the exam. Next page, I looked down at something that almost looked doable but was shut down when I realized it was a much more complex problem than I had thought, guess that makes two to come back to. Next page, I let out a chuckle as a response to my disbelief at the type of problem I was being asked to solve, something that people would have only joked about having to do on an exam. I looked up to see the entire room flipping pages, not because they were zooming through each problem, but because they also had no idea what to do. With the hour I had, I pondered, scribbled, puzzled, erased, etched, and scrawled the pages with pathetic attempts in hopes of squeezing some participation points. Before I knew it, I had reached the end of the packet and what do you know, no bonus question. I let out an audible “Oh shoot.” 

The exam had ended and we populated the lobby to converse with friends and classmates on the horror we just witnessed, the murder of our grades. “Dude, I didn’t know what to do on that one.” my friend Kyler responded after being asked what question 3 was like for him. “That was insane.” blurted Abby. “What the heck was that?” questioned Issac. “Yeah, no I definitely got a 30 percent.” Mike chuckled. “Aggghhhh” croaked Trevor. I laughed, we all know we did badly, we all knew our professors were going to be tougher on us from this point on, and we also knew our grades were definitely gonna get screwed up. However, we were suffering together and we knew we were going to endure it all together. We had prepared the best we could for this exam, there was nothing we could do to prepare for the difficulty of the last-moment changes. I was frustrated because I had really thought I was going to do well on this exam, even without the study session. Even though our TA was making it easier for us, we actually knew our material quite well as we were preparing for what we knew would be a difficult exam. The professors definitely made this new exam much harder than what a “hard” exam should have been to ensure that fewer people did well. It’s common practice but it was definitely overkill on their part which we believe was influenced not only by the time constraint that was presented to them to switch the exam hours before but also influenced by emotion. These professors trusted our TA, “the godsend” to guide us and make us better students, not make it easier for us, so for them to learn of his actions must have been infuriating. We were all upset, we prepared for success but instead, we were met with utter failure out of nowhere. Maybe there were some people who had prepared just as much as us but were just a little bit smarter and figured some of the questions out, but that wasn’t us for sure. We walked out into the frigid February wind, laughing at how difficult the exam was. “Let’s go get ice cream!” I exclaimed.