mr. mxylplyx

I think of this picture as a pretty good metaphor for the practice test. Even though I was tired, jet-lagged, and unable to think, it was only a trial run to test what would happen in the event of the real thing, and even though I feel like I hit the wall on a few identifications, it was only a dummy test after all. Plus, I don't think I totally crashed and burned on it. I knew enough about the great majority of the passages I chose to discuss that I think overall the assessment of my knowledge by an actual comittee would have been not too harsh. The fact that, even on the ones that I wasn't sure of, getting close to the general period and being able to discuss some salient features about the style and content of the excerpt would score me some kind of cool points in the evaluators' hypothetical estimation was a comfort, and I think acted as a cushioning effect to save even my dummy effort from totally wiping out in the end. Now that the test is over, I am going to pick up the pieces, analyze the data, and most of all, get some more studying in before the next trial run, so that hopefully next time I can do a little better. I think the analysis we did in class of everybody's collective responses definitely helped me to get a handle on the way I need to approach explicating passages where my knowledge is a little shaky or incomplete, so I'm definitely glad that we have coming up a few more of these little trial runs to give me a chance to work on actual test taking techniques as well.