GAH!

Before today, I had never knowingly bombed a test. At 9 this morning, I went to take a Mathematical Structures test. I was fairly confident in my ability to do the test, and nothing was incredibly frustrating. Except for one thing.

Part of the class deals with symbolically representing statements. For example, "If I don't water the plant, then it will die," is of the form if p, then q, symbolically represented p-->q. No problem there. But there are about 8 other ways to say the same thing. I can say "If the plant lives, then I watered it." I can say "Either I watered the plant or it died." I can say "I know I didn't water the plant only if it died." Or I can say (and here's the big one) "The plant will die unless I water it."

Two out of seven problems used the "unless" wording. And sadly, while "p unless q" translates to (not p)-->q, I translated it to p-->(not q), which is the opposite. Somehow I even got it in my head that the teacher had written something vague in one of the problems, and I castigated her for using "unless" vaguely. Except it wasn't really vague, and my interpretation of the vagueness was based on my incorrect interpretation of the word "unless." So I probably got about a 60% on that test, which is 20% of my semester grade. Gah.

I'd like to blame a lot of things, and I'm sure they had a lot of impact on my performance—I'm just getting over being sick, I didn't get enough sleep, I was in a weird environment, the teacher made too much of the test depend on "unless" clauses, but they're pretty wimpy excuses. I made a dumb mistake. A really big dumb mistake. Gah.