I received my Chapter 2 test back, and stared at horror at my grade - B. Worst, I had spent a [insert swear word]ing 5 hours the previous night studying for the test, forcing myself to comply to this rigged education system. I did every exercise in systematic order, checking my answers with the solutions of the textbook.

The most pathetic points I lost was on question 2. Question 1 asked you to vaguely describe the distribution of some data, and so I included a calculation of the inter-quartile range to show that there were no outliers. After I finished the question, I flipped to the second page of the test - only to see the question "use the inter-quartile range of the data to show that there exists no outliers [2 pts]." "Oh psh," I thought, as I simply wrote:

"it suffices to show that the entire data set is bounded within the calculations of which are shown on the previous page,"

and moved on to the next question. Result? I received a big fat 0/2 for "not showing work." Worse, the whole test was out of 20 points, so there goes a solid 10 percent of my grade. I also got deducted for random reasons like forgetting to state the context or writing too much.

Feeling triumphant of the fact my stats grade is finally an A, I went home to study for the Chapter 3 test tomorrow. This time - making sure to be extra careful of following directions.

Just the day before yesterday, I received my Chapter 3 test back, which I feel much more confident about - I finished in literally half the time and literally read through 20 different AoPS threads before the end of class.

Result? B yet again. The reason this time, apparently, was because I wrote too much and gave extra info that wasn't required, which caused me to lose 2 points, and down goes my overall grade to a A-. Worse, the teacher that day was even more hyper than he normally was, so I gave up trying to argue with him, and went home to cry.

Essay: (basically meaning its worth a lot) An object is dropped onto the ground, the whole duration being 10 s, its final speed right before hitting the ground being 10 m/s. Person A tells person B: "Oh look! The speed is 10, so the ball must've been dropped 10*10 =100 meters!" Explain why person A is not correct, using a physical demonstration.

I almost laughed when I saw this question, and quickly wrote down my proof, which went something like this:

The problem is literally asking you to prove the average of a monodically increasing function (in this case linear) is smaller than the max.

I was actually feeling particularly lighthearted at the time due to the triviality of the test, so I felt like overkilling the problem with Jensen's inequality. But then I remembered the teacher would probably be upset for being outsmarted by a student, so I guess I'll save my wits for my poor senior year teachers, after college apps.

So I randomly wrote some stuff. For the "physical demonstration" part, I just said to consider another object which is lowered with a constant speed of 10 m/s for 10 s, and since the speed of that object is strictly greater than this object at all times (except the last instant), the total distance is obviously greater.

Result? I freaking got a C for this essay portion, mainly because the teacher said my explanation didn't reflect the exceeding standards of the AP curriculum, which were carefully-crafted paragraphs of trivial nonsense that my teacher expects us to study and follow. I ended up with a B for my first physics test, dragging my grade from 96 to 92.6, barely an A.