I took my last final this morning.

I had a solid A in both my classes coming into the final weeks. Just showing up and writing my name on the finals would guarantee me a C+ in CIS 330 (Computer And Network Architecture) and a C in CIS 313 (Visual Basic .NET). I did a little back-of-envelope calculating and figured that I only needed a 84% on the 330 final and a 69% on the 313 final to get A’s in both classes. This is a completely different experience for me. Normally I am trying to figure out how much a perfect score on the final will pull up my overall grade. It’s kind of nice seeing it from the other point of view.

I took my last final this morning. I didn’t study as much as I should have and I wasn’t terribly confident about the results. But it was over. On my way home I stopped at the grocery store. I couldn’t resist sitting at the blood pressure machine and giving it a try. My systolic (the big number) and pulse were stunningly high. I closed my eyes for 30 seconds and relaxed. Then I took it again. The systolic was lower by 20 and the pulse was lower by about 15. Apparently finals stress me out more than I thought.

Back during the last time I went to college, we didn’t see our grades until they were mailed to us weeks later. Turns out things are different now. You can use this here Internet thingie to find out your grades as they are turned in. I checked a few times today, not really expecting anything to be posted yet. Surprisingly my 313 grade was posted a mere four hours after the final was over. A couple hours after that my 330 grade showed up.

They were both A’s.

That would be my first 4.0 semester in, well, in my entire life? Okay, it’s only two classes, but it’s still a 4.0 semester! That’s quite a change from my former pong ponging between being on academic probation and off academic probation. I don’t know exactly how it will affect my overall GPA but it looks like it will go up by 0.2. Not bad for two classes. And it gets me a little breathing room (and off of academic probation).

Hopefully this will silence my doubters. (That includes the little voice in the back of my own head that was telling me that I was going to fail at this… Again… That voice was wrong! HA!)