Briar's grades are slipping.

She's not outright failing her classes, and she knows you aren't supposed to get As in the Scholomance unless you're going for valedictorian. But at the beginning of the semester she was getting Bs and Cs, and now she's getting Cs and Ds, and Ds are still passing but it's definitely not ideal.

Jeremy is doing her remedial algebra midterm, which is probably good because she still doesn't understand how to solve quadratic equations any way but the quadratic formula. The downside of this is that she had to write a second essay for Modern Magical History, but that was one of her easiest midterm assignments, and doing it twice was less than twice as difficult.

Her parents gave her a formula, before she left for the Scholomance, for how to write essays that will get a passing grade without too much work, if you don't care about whether they're good or whether they help you actually learn the material. You write something about why the topic is important, and then you write a "thesis statement" where you list off all the reasons for whatever you're arguing, and then you write a paragraph for each reason, and try to find some quotes in the textbook to back it up, and then you write a conclusion. You shouldn't try to make your sentences anything better than grammatically coherent, and you shouldn't try to worry about saying anything interesting. The point is just to write an essay that will get a passing grade as quickly as possible.

She has a list of all of her midterm assignments left. According to the list, her next assignment due is an essay for Malice and Maleficaria in 18th-century French poetry.

Choose one of Évariste de Parny's Élégies, and analyze its themes, with a special focus on how those themes relate to the topics of this course. Minimum word count: 750.

Well, the theme of the course is Malice and Maleficaria, it's literally in the title, so probably the essay is supposed to be about that, she thinks. She's not nearly good enough at French to read the poetry in the original without help, but she has an English translation, and if she puts it by the French text she can sort of muddle through. The Scholomance doesn't seem to care if all her quotes are in English.

Malice and Maleficaria are very important in Évariste de Parny's Élégies. Although he was a mundane, mundanes still can feel malice towards others. Mundanes can also encounter maleficaria, they just don't know what they are, so they might describe them as other animals or natural phenomena. Two examples of themes of Elegie 2 are how there are tyrants who are malicious by forcing a woman to get married and how the poet feels malice towards Eleanore for betraying him even though he loved her.

Briar counts the words. 86, which isn't bad for an opening paragraph, but she should probably add a third point, so that her body paragraphs can be a little shorter. Well, right now she only mentions malice, not maleficaria. 

Malice and Maleficaria are very important in Évariste de Parny's Élégies. Although he was a mundane, mundanes still can feel malice towards others. Mundanes can also encounter maleficaria, they just don't know what they are, so they might describe them as other animals or natural phenomena. Two Three examples of themes of Elegie 2 are how there are tyrants who are malicious by forcing a woman to get married, and how the poet feels malice towards Eleanore for betraying him even though he loved her, and how the lightning bolt is similar to magic people use for fighting maleficaria.

The third point doesn't really make sense, she thinks, but you can usually get away with one point that doesn't make sense.

One theme in Elegie 2 is how there are tyrants who are malicious because they force a woman to get married even though she doesn't want to. The poem says "Dragged to the altar by tyrants, despite her sobs." If she wanted to get married, they would not have to drag her, and she would not be sobbing (which means crying). This means that the tyrants are acting maliciously towards her by forcing her to get married even though she doesn't want to. If they cared about her feelings they would let her choose whether or not to get married and who she wanted to get married to. The fact that the poem calls them tyrants also tells the reader that they are malicious, since being a tyrant is bad. The poet might have thought it was especially bad because according to the textbook, "Élégies was published in 1784" and also "The French Revolution, which began in 1789, marked a turning point in French culture." This means that the poem was written right before the French Revolution, so Evariste de Parny probably though tyrants were especially bad. In summary, one theme in Elegie 2 is tyrants being malicious by forcing a woman to get married.

Briar continues similarly with the rest of her essay. It comes in at 812 words, which is longer than it needs to be, but not by enough to feel like a waste of time. 

The next thing on her list is to study for her Intro to Probability midterm. In hindsight, she regrets not trying harder to switch out of the class. She had figured it would be easy since it has "Intro" in the name, but basically everyone else has taken more math than she has. There's a graded homework assignment to fill out the answers to a "study guide" full of practice questions, which she hopes will be about the same difficulty as the actual test.

Suppose you are taking a multiple-choice test with c choices for each question. In answering a question on this test, the probability that you know the answer is p. If you don’t know the answer, you choose one at random. What is the probability that you knew the answer to a question, given that you answered it correctly? (x)

This would be easier if there were numbers, she thinks. The class keeps trying to make her do math with letters, which is stupid, because in the real world you'll never be taking a test with c choices, you'll be taking a test with two or four or five choices. 

She's pretty sure you're supposed to assume that the chance of guessing right is 1 in c? Which doesn't really make sense, since usually there are some answers that are obviously wrong, but if you can't assume that she doesn't see how to solve the problem. And then if you know it the chance is 1 in 1 because obviously if you know it you'll get it right. So then she needs to figure out how to get from the probability you know it to the probability of getting it right.

This is kind of complicated, she thinks. She draws a flowchart on her paper to see if she can make it make sense.

Okay. She thinks that makes sense. So that means that there's a 1/p*1 chance of getting it right and knowing it, which is 1/p. Then there's a (1-1/p)*1/c chance of not knowing it and getting it right, and a (1-1/p)*(1-1/c) chance of not knowing it and getting it wrong, but that's not relevant. So, if you got it right, then there's a 1/p chance of getting it correct because you knew it, and a (1-1/p)*1/c chance of getting it correct and not knowing it, so the chance of knowing it conditional on getting it right should be the chance that you got it right because you knew it divided by the chance of just getting lucky, which is 1/p/((1-1/p)*1/c). Then that's just simplifying fractions, which she knows how to do.  1/p/((1-1/p)*1/c) = 1/p/((1/c-1/pc)) = 1/p/(p/c-1/pc) = 1/p/((p-1)/c) = c/(p*(p-1)). She circles that on her paper.

She's going to be able to get through midterms, she thinks. This is hard, but not nearly as hard as she'd been worried about.