About that 89. Or try to do something, at least.
I talked about complaining after the last test, but never did. Because clearly it would have been inappropriate given the circumstances. This time though, I might actually do it in regard to that one question where I changed my answer because of the word "external".
I've found a paper from 1978 from Trinity College at the University of Dublin, claiming that an experiment showed temperature did affect cell cycle time in particular cases with HeLa cells. A second paper from 1985 from Northwestern talks about the effects of extreme heat shock on the Mitotic cycle when cells are shifted between severly warm and severly cold environments, and back again, with no time to adjust. There seems to have been some impact there as well. If I have some free time this weekend, I'm going to go through these papers, look for others, cite them - and then go ask for at least one of my two points back (I'll also point out that a cell's damage was an /internal/ condition).
Is it petty? Yes. (Remember when I was talking about being OCD in my studying a few posts back? This sort of nonsense is a great example of that...) Is it going to change my final grade in the course? Probably not, even if I get it changed on this one question. Will it make me feel better? Absolutely.
The only real question is how it will make the teacher feel... will she start thinking of me as a completely insufferable person who went out of the way to get 1-2% back on an exam in which they didn't do badly in the first place, or will they be marginally impressed by the fact I cared enough to do outside research, cite it, and bring it up? If I'm polite about the whole thing... I don't know. It could go either way, and make them think better about me or worse.
Edit: Just got that Lab "exam" back this afternoon, and I actually got an A- on it instead of the B/B+ I thought I might have had, so that's more good news. It looks like my lab grade now is a strong A, and will help drag the overall grade up to a 4.0 if it ends up just a bit short of that.
