Have you ever had a good grade, like an A or B, that was right on the line, when all of of a sudden a test swoops in and takes it away from you? This morning I had an A in physics. 7 hours later I am traumatized after seeing it be stoned to death, burned, and thrown into a pool of acid. This feeling is just the worst.
Eh, introductory linguistics is pretty easy once you get past the phonetics part (especially if you're having to work with all IPA symbols rather than just the ones for whatever standard dialect dominates your region). It's basically knowledge-and-recall and very straightforward/algorithmic analysis once you get into semantics and structure. Can't speak about higher-level stuff- obviously, things like NLP and computational linguistics are very, very hard- but I'm curious as to which linguistics program you're doing.
Curious about the job market for linguists. I have a friend at UChicago doing linguistics, but literally have no idea what kind of job she's looking to get with it. I guess there's a market for analytical linguistics though...
Natural Language Processing is pretty big (think Siri/Amazon Echo/etc. but on a more theoretical level- how are we able to even parse these acoustic signals into human-readable language? How are we able to automatically/algorithmically extract meaning from human-readable language? These are hard problems.) but beyond that I'm also curious.
You categorize grades by letter, with A usually meaning "great," B "decent", C "passing", D "meh" (although sometimes it's passing as well), and F "fail gg rekt." It's a useful system because curving is more trivial- instead of generating an algorithm to make grades comparable between different courses, you can simply change the ranges for each letter category.
I didn't take that test. That test took me. And now I have my English teacher telling me I suck at translating poems (I thought only the poet knows the meaning of his/her poem, but I guess English teachers are gods on Earth) and now I have a B in English, too!
