On Friday work ends at 1600 instead of the normal 1700, so I was in town and on my way to the gym a whole hour early (woop) ... As I walked through campus - hey, you don't spend £140 on a 12 month university gym pass and not use it! - I passed the School of Modern Languages (SML) building and thought "ah heck I should just pop in and see where my results are at" ... so I did.

I arrived on the top floor, (yes, SML reception is as far away from anywhere as they could be), and asked when the second year results would be out, eyeing the masses of brown envelopes in front of the two secretaries. Turns out they were just going to be posted, but in the spirit of a Friday afternoon when people are generally happy the weekend is round the corner, both of them sat down and rooted through these carefully elastic-band bound piles of envelopes just for mine Not being particularly bothered about the outcome I decided to open it there and then - I mean, waiting to be in private isn't going to change my marks, and I'd only worry for that much longer. So here, ladies and gentlemen, is the breakdown of my second year final mark:

73 - Level B Chinese (a lot lower than I was expecting)

71 - Introduction to Chinese Society and Culture (that was an architecture essay I wrote, worth 100% of the module mark)

71 - 20th Century Chinese History (from an exam consisting of 2 essays and 1 gobbet, together worth 100% of the mark)

70 - Political Geography (from 2 essays, one worth 30% and the other 70% <--- I must have done a lot better on that second one for my mark to be as high overall )

64 - Traditional East Asian Political Thought (based on an exam in which 2 gobbets were written, worth 50% of the mark, and a group coursework worth another 50% <--- I must have done pretty badly in the exam, because my group's coursework mark was amazing )

Unfortunately, no overall mark was given, so I did the maths myself.

(73+71+71+70+64) divided by 5 ----> 349 / 5 ----> 69.8 <--- oh no, "only" a 2:1!

But then I read the paper properly, and realised that Chinese is worth double all the others (which is why I thought it was quite a low mark, because in semester 1 I was getting something like 85, so in semester 2 I must have got only around 60 to end up with 73 overall. I digress.) So I redid the maths, doubling my Chinese mark to account for its extra weight.

(73+73+71+71+70+64) divided by 6 ----> 422 / 6 ----> 70.3 <--- wahey, I scraped a First! ( people who read about this time last year may recall that I got exactly the same mark for my first year but from wildly fluctuating grades, at least this time I'm consistently good).

And in other news, on Friday I got to use a funky IR keyboard to program next week's meetings schedule on the announcements board at work. Yay.