I had statistics today. Since there's no lab this week, and Jeff and I are in the same lab, we made plans to meet tomorrow at our lab time and compare answers for our take-home exam. After that, I had two and a half hours before my abnormal psych test. Those two and a half hours really dragged on, but I went over all the PowerPoint slides again and studied my terms on Quizlet some more. It's pretty handy living in this day and age. My mom wouldn't have had access to that kind of thing when she went here.
The test was surprisingly easy, I thought. I guess I just prepared well enough. It's also nice that he told us in advance a few questions that would be on the test (like the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist). Sometimes there were three vocabulary words (like agonist, antagonist, and inverse agonist), and he'd say only one would be on the test, but he wouldn't tell us which one. Two questions were about a video we'd watched in class and were pretty easy.
I went through my test circling all the answers as I thought of them, and finished the thirty questions in about ten minutes, before anyone had come down to place their test on the table (left side of the table for leave early, right side for staying after to here the answers here and now once everybody was done). I then went through a second time as I copied my answers over to the scantron.
Now people started coming down. After that was done, I checked my scantron to ensure I hadn't missed any bubbles or left questions blank. Everything seemed to be in order. More and more people were coming. After one more skim over my answers, I got up as well. My original plan had been to wait until everyone else was finished so we could go over the test answers right then, but if I'd chosen to do that, I would have had to sit in my chair twiddling my thumbs for an hour. No reading books, drawing, working on other work... Just like middle school exams again, only longer.
So instead of doing that, I went to the library and used a computer that had the SPSS graphing program I needed in order to complete the online half of one of my assignments. I was there for an hour, leaving only a few minutes before my abnormal psych class would be going over their answers. I considered swinging by, but I had the feeling I shouldn't walk back into the testing room after I had left. Looking back on it, maybe I should have hovered outside the door where I wouldn't have been seen. Oh well. I know for next time now.
I saved my work as a PDF and printed it out when I got home, so I didn't have to pay for all the papers or anything, and just to ensure that I could. We were supposed to make up our own variables (one nominal, one ordinal, one interval, one ratio) and invent fake information for twenty-five different people:
As you can see, you have to program nominal variables, like the drink column, with numbers in the table, but make it so they appear as labels when you create the graphs (My drinks were "no drink", "water", "milk", and "grape juice". My subject was "how much people enjoy macaroni", then I had birth year, then how many times macaroni is eaten per month.
Since I had macaroni on the brain, I did dishes while I cooked macaroni for dinner and then swept the kitchen floor. Then, macaroni in hand, I began work on my online statistics assignments. I wanted to get them at least mostly done because they're due at 11:00 Thursday night, and Wednesday is so busy for me. Mom called to ask me how my test went, since she knew I'd been worried for it. I might have missed one, and maybe two, but I went over my answers carefully and I think I made the correct choices. We'll have to see when I get my scores back soon.
