I Did a Good Job.

I got my grades today for my first year at LSE. I got an overall distinction, as well as a distinction in each individual class. Hooray! Maybe I will get to go to a good PhD program after all.

All my exam scores were above seventy, and I understand that for scoring purposes LSE doesn't differentiate between them. But it's interesting to note that I got my highest grades (85 and 86) in my hardest exams (econometrics and graph theory, respectively), and my lowest grade (72 in computational learning theory) was in the exam that I thought I had done the best on. This suggests that there's a large random component to the grades, which mitigates my pride a little. Should it be surprising that using a single two-or three-hour exam to measure a student's ability has a large random component? Of course not, especially when the graders are never held accountable to students for their grading, since we never see our corrected exams.

But I'll take it. And with this, it's settled - I'll be in London for another year for certain.