You remember the instructor I was ranting about? The one who (maybe) accused me of using black? Here's what she had to say about my final project:
I gave out only two perfect scores for this assignment, and you are receiving one of them.
Amazingly enough, I'm now less irritated by the use-of-black thing.
In all seriousness, I take this as a serious compliment. Throughout the class she never held back from telling us if our designs didn't quite work. Whether or not I agreed with her - and really, apart from the one issue, I could see what she was getting at, at least in what she said to me - nobody could accuse her of being a pushover. That I managed to impress her a little means something to me. It might even mean I don't completely stink at this, which would be nice.
The only puzzling thing is who else got the perfect score. I looked at everybody's work again, and at least three of them I would easily grade higher than my own (and I'm pretty proud of what I did). But of course, she's looking for some very specific things; and although I know better now what they are, I still don't have as much practice discerning degrees of "goodness" in a design. I just know which ones make me say "Yow" and which ones don't. There were a lot of "yows" in my class. Even the ones I didn't like as much as my own were pretty amazing.
It was a difficult class, and a frustrating one in many ways; but I sure can't say I didn't learn anything!
My question now is: which of my instructors this term is going to drive me crazy? So far there has been at least one each term; but two points does not make a straight line. I'll know better after the first set of grades, I suppose. I know grades are only one sort of measure - but among other things, they measure whether or not my employer will keep paying. I did well last term; I'll try to do well this term too.