My Financial Management Professor Hates Me

In this blog, I’m going to tell the story of what happened to me during my final yesterday. I’m not telling it to complain or to whine for a better grade. I'm just telling the story. Because it truly fucking sucked. My experience in Blackman Auditorium yesterday, while it was only a couple of hours, was one of the most irritating, stressful, and unreal experiences in my life. Here’s what happened, and it’s a doozy.

I got to Blackman Auditorium for the exam, everything normal. Knowing the drill, I grab a clipboard and head to the back (only nutjobs and teacher's pets sit in the front), same as always. They say the devil's in the details so even though I pulled three all-nighters and dropped $50 on addy prepping for this moment, I open up my laptop to run through the practice problems once more. That’s when the unthinkable happens: the network crashes. Just like it did in The Social Network. And of course, it hit me minutes before anyone else. While a few extra minutes may sound trivial to those who haven't popped their DMSB Finals cherry, experienced academics like myself know how life-saving they can be.

So I'm about to get up and show the TA my screen (a gigantic clock has replaced the Canvas homepage) when I hear the chick in front of me ask her friend "did your wifi stop working too." And that’s when it begins. The next 30 minutes is a clusterfuck of those with internet problems being ushered to other rooms on campus to take the exam, proctors with no experience emergency zooming the professor for help, and sleep-deprived students becoming more and more agitated at the situation.

Eventually they fix the wifi and I'm finally able to access the exam. This is the first and probably the last time that I will only have one final so I rolled the fattest joint to celebrate. I'm actually excited to get this over with. But of course, my professor slaps me in the face with the biggest boner-killing test of all time. Here are my two main gripes:

1. It should be illegal to give an exam worth 40% of students' grades when the material is 40x harder than anything we ever covered in class. If you give me a practice final, I am not expecting an exact carbon copy for the real deal. But you can't give us problems that two-year-olds can solve and then beef up the final with questions Warren Buffet probably couldn't answer. That's fucking retarded.

2. If my professor hadn't left us like a deadbeat to go party in India, this whole thing could have been avoided. Obviously he has no control over the internet, but he sure as shit would be a lot more helpful than the TAs in this situation. I know it isn't their fault but when Mylab force submitted my questions before the time was up and randomized the order on my next attempt, the only thing they could say was "Sorry, try to figure it out from memory." I spent ALL of the extra 30 minutes solving problems I had already solved.

Now lemme give Aggarwal some credit. Before I took this class, I saw on ratemyprofessors.com that he was very knowledgeable about finance and that students who were engaged in his class learned a lot. I do not doubt that one bit, it just doesn't apply to me (I spent half the classes making parlays and reading about the Sox on Twitter). He also gave us a practice exam which wasn't very helpful since the content was nothing like what was on the actual final, but the sentiment was there. I feel like practice questions or study guides should be required of teachers since they usually just copy and paste their tests from the internet and then hang their students out to dry. I cannot imagine what the other section had to go through without access to Chegg or ChatGPT. I know my 2.7 GPA lookin ass wouldn't have survived.

I have a train to catch and some Dunkin to order so fuck the ending to the blog. If you take one thing with you from this read, avoid FINA 2201 like the plague. Nothing good can come from it.