we'll see how it goes

Today (actually, Apr. 30 so yesterday I suppose) was quite the day for me in several ways. It was our last exam and so it marks the end of living in university residence, of 3rd year Pharmacy, of taking a typical didactic schedule for school, and to be honest, the end of many convenient friendships as they graduate and leave for bigger things. Apart from what I felt about our exams, I have really mixed feelings about this day, and about where I am right now. I don't think I've had the time to think thoroughly about this, so I think I'll write about something unrelated here.

One of the things I've been trying to rationalize is asking myself how important doing well in school really is to me. For the last two weeks, to be honest, I have not been studying as hard as my colleagues. I don't have that capacity to sit down and do something that repetitive for two weeks straight. I recently also posted my notes for my classmates if they wanted them, and apparently more people than I thought found them useful. I told myself that I wasn't really a competitive person, and so the more people that benefitted, the better. But then, I would get back a mark on an exam or assignment that is below standard and feel upset, and for some reason, that feeling is mitigated if I compare favourably to the class distribution. I might feel jealous if a classmate shares about his or her awesome work experience at some pharmacy.

So how extrinsically motivated am I? I don't like the idea of being extrinsically motivated; I like to think that I'm doing what I do for myself, and that it shouldn't matter how well my classmates do. And I think I have it figured out, but feel free to shoot me down. If, let's say, out of my class, three people get an award, I want to be one of those three people. But if ten people get an award, I want to be among that top ten, and it doesn't really matter to me where I am in that top ten. I think that for me, there is a difference between where my motivation comes from and how I measure success and satisfaction. I really do think I am mostly intrinsically motivated; I don't care for drama, for competition, or for what others think I should be or should do. But I do care about how I am doing relative to other people; ie, using others as a measuring stick. I do care what my "rank" (roughly speaking) is in the class, but it's more of me wanting to do well rather than me wanting to be better than anyone else.

Lately, what I have been telling people is "we'll see how it goes" in terms of my exams. I really think that at some point, there isn't much us students can do, from an economics perspective. The premise that we will do better if we study harder, better, and smarter, is only true if the exam is predictable; ie. if we know that increasing our time studying will marginally improve our outcome on the exam. I'm going to argue that this premise is only "generally" true, and what I mean I've interpreted below.

If we look at the extremes, it becomes obvious that if you know very little, this premise is as good as true (ie. you will benefit from studying). However, if you know your stuff, you will benefit from studying even less than the marginal expected improvement, due to this intrinsic variability. And this variability can be explained by several factors:
1) silly mistakes. Your propensity to make "silly mistakes," or errors that are unrelated to your actual ability to answer the question, is constant regardless of how much you study.
2) humans write and mark the exams. I'm sure everyone has had their mark adjusted on an exam before. Would you like to speculate the percentage of exams on campus that are marked at least somewhat incorrectly? And this is also constant regardless of how much you study.
3) exams aren't predictable. Everyone has written a question that requires knowledge that you wouldn't have predicted you would have needed to memorize (otherwise, you would have!).
4) question ambiguity. Professors often ask slightly ambiguous questions and refuse to clarify (obviously, otherwise you would know the answer). This is also constant regardless of how much you study, and is perhaps the most frustrating of them all. It seems that eventually, what matters is what the profs ask and how they ask it, and not what I know.

So that's why I've been trying not to care so much. I'm sure that when I get my marks back, I will be disappointed when I compare to my usual benchmarks. And we'll see whether my logical argument of why I shouldn't care so much about my results make this any easier.