Preliminaries: Last Student Standing

So today I have another exam (or prelim, as we call it) and have a paper due. The exam is for sociology, and I pretty much failed my previous one, so I've been doing alot of studying (by pretty much fail, I mean I got a B-, which though not too bad is horrible in comparison to the rest of the class and to the quality of work I should be doing). I hope to do a bit better on this one.

This brings me to the primary topic for this post: Exams. I am incredibly lucky with my exams. While most my friends and acquaintances have weeks in which they have anywhere from 1-4 exams, I have them once in a while. This is due to the fact that only one of my classes is regular with exams, whereas all of my other classes either have periodic quizzes or no exams. But still, I manage to have them often enough, when combined with the large number of papers I have. Why am I still talking about myself, no one cares. Oh well, my haiku:

You know that you're at
Cornell when exams are called
Preliminaries


The idea of a preliminary is most commonly found in sports. It refers to the rounds prior to finals and such which you will make it to- if you survive preliminaries. If you apply this model to the Cornell exam schedule, you get a rather bleak outlook: You take these exams, and if you don't survive, you don't make it to finals. Whether this survival refers to staying in a class or staying alive is up in the air. But in any case, the origin of the name is not something to think about.