First lot of assignments and exam

This blog is way overdue, a lot has being going on for me for the last couple of weeks. Exams and deadlines, I've found out the hard way about the joys of assignments, practical write ups and exams. Midway through my human structure and function module we had an exam, and because i'm trying for a merit based scholarship I worked my ass off. Some of the topics in the first half included the endocrine & reproductive system, tissues and evolution of homo sapiens. Our lecturer basically gives us some vague lecture notes which you then expand on, now I record lectures and replay them when I'm stuck on anything in particular because I always thought that anything that's examined will have been taught to us. That wasn't particularly the case.
When the day of the exam came I was unprepared, because unlike at college and school, you cant retake to get a better mark. The make it or break it moment came and I felt sick. The actual exam questions were hard and most of them you wouldn't have gotten right unless you did some extra reading. It was composed of 30 questions and 20 of them I was 99% sure that I had got right, another 5 were an educated guess and the last 5 a random guess.I was aiming for at least 85% but after seeing the exam questions, I was pretty content with what I achieved. This was the nice bit.

OMG assignments! One pitfall of doing A levels is that they dont prepare you for assignments. My first assignment was to compare and contrast the structures of eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Simple essay question, but you cant use what you know unless you can find a reliable source to reference from. So my college biology teacher telling me that they have different sized ribosomes wouldn't be able to go in my assignment. What really screwed me over is that I didn't have that long to complete it, I think I've had it for 2/3 weeks, but I prioritised my exam, leaving me 5 days to complete that assignment and a practical write up. To cut a long story short, I made a complete mess of both, and most of the marks lost were due to referencing. And I cant re-do them.
I believe that you should be able to retake/re-do things as many times as you need to, this is actually from my personal experience. I got a D in my core maths module, not once, not twice but 3 times until finally I got an A in it, but oh well! So now the only way for me to get a decent grade in my chemistry module is to do amazingly well in the exam.

I would've never imagined a busy schedule like this, but I guess that the constant deadlines means leaving little time to slack. But it has taught me one thing, that I love biology over chemistry, don't get me wrong I find chemistry really interesting but no, I cant risk my final grade doing another chemistry module.

Semester 1 is nearly over and it felt more like a year, it's made me hungrier and has changed me as a person. This will make more sense in the next blog.