To the gallows, originally uploaded by Jacqueline1776.

Update: It was brutal.  I'm sure I flunked the exam.  As soon as I saw the questions I realized that I'd studied the wrong material, in the wrong way.  I could only answer half the questions and just wrote vague bullshit for the other half (if you leave it blank you're guaranteed to get 0 points, but if you at least write *something* you *might* get partial credit mercy points!). 

I will be *lucky* to get a C in the class now.  My only hope of a better grade is if everyone else did as badly as I did and he decides to curve the exam grades.  UNLV has pretty low standards, so it's plausible that a professor would do that instead of giving out a lot of C's and D's.  (Rumor has it that last semester after most of the economics class flunked the final exam, the professor threw the whole exam out and didn't count it for calculating grades.)

I don't know if procrastinating less and studying more could have even helped me in this class.  The lectures consisted of him scrolling through one densely-packed PowerPoint slide after another without much indication of which of the hundreds of terms/concepts and thousands of details he presented were important, or how they related to one another and the big picture.  The textbook wasn't much better.  Apparently I have no aptitude for Marketing because I was never able to see the big picture or structure on my own, and without any outside help to figure that out I was left trying to brute force memorize what appeared to me as just a jumbled mess of crap.  I will have to debrief with some of my classmates and see if they feel the same way -- did the class just suck, or do I suck at Marketing?  I suspect the answer is probably both -- I bet that I did worse than average on the exam, but not by that much.

I'm pretty sure I got an A on the project (30%), and a C or B for class participation (20%).  I got a B on the case analysis papers (25%).  But with an F on the final (25%), the best I can do is around 77% for the class.  If I've overestimated my grade for the project or class participation, I could even get a D.

I should have listened to my better judgment and withdrawn from the class six weeks ago like I wanted to.  In the same amount of time (~150 hours) I wasted since then completing the Marketing class with a C or a D, I could have probably knocked out TWO of my distance learning accounting prerequisite classes with A's.  Even the additional amount I'd have to spend on tuition later for a different elective for my MS Accounting program is far less than what I've probably lost now in merit-based grants by blowing my GPA.

:(

SUNK COSTS VS. MARGINAL COSTS, KIDDIES.  Learn it, love it, live it!  Ignore it and you will suffer as I have suffered.  (If I can't be a good example, at least I can be a cautionary tale, right?)

(Edit: Hubby points out that withdrawing from a class mid-semester could have screwed up my financial aid in other, more costly ways than getting a C will, so perhaps he was right that completing the class was still the +EV move even after my realization that it was going to be a huge time and motivation suck and my chances of a good grade were slim to none.  My reasoning about sunk vs. marginal costs in these situations applies when financial aid programs are not involved, though.)

...

Oh well.  What's done is done.  I'm going to go finish my accounting project now so I can put this semester and everything to do with the MBA program behind me.