and I have my answer!

Plunge Down in Colour
Okay, so! I got my Japanese midterm back, and now I have all kinds of data on how well I can and can't game a test.

The grammar, as expected, I largely p0wned. And yeah, I barely studied it at all. I lost only one point to actual grammatical error caused by actually getting the grammar wrong. (I lost a couple of others to getting tenses wrong, due to getting time words wrong, so I'd write present tense instead of past, or vise-versa.) I also lost one point to forgetting one of the katakana characters in a written portion. That works out to around 96% of that material correct. I'm not sure what to do with this number, but I suppose it shows what I learned in everything we're covering that isn't vocabulary.

In the vocabulary portion I could least game - listen to a snippet of conversation and select the answer most accurately describing the conversation - I did even worse than I'd expected; I could only get 25% of those questions right. That's no better than random guessing, given that it was multiple choice.

In the vocabularly-related areas I could game - which were the rest of the vocabulary portions in the test - I did quite well, getting 91% of the questions right. That includes a swath of questions that were vocabulary testing in theory, but which I answered largely if not entirely on the basis of probable grammars. So apparently that works well.

It's tempting to think from this that I can "game" a vocabulary testing section that involves sentences from 25% to 91%, which is to say, a 66 point climb. However, I've just remembered that some of that section was purely on paper. Eliminating that portion, my accuracy rating was 87.5% for material which also had an oral component, lowering the "gaming" gain to 62.5 points, or 250%. That isn't much of a drop and still seems crazily high to me, so I assume there are other factors involved.

Anyway. All this ended up giving me a final score of 81.5%, which, you know, honestly isn't that bad. Taking out approximated gains from gaming gets me a final score of around 65%, which is right at about the low end of the range I'd expected based on what I actually thought I'd learned. (60% would have been reasonable - the low D I was talking about before.) So on the whole exam - which includes parts I didn't need to game, specifically grammar and kana - I added 16.5 points to my extrapolated score, or about 25% of my total grade.

And now I know. Yay! Unfortunately, as my teacher said, there's only more vocabulary coming at higher rates, and less stuff that I learn well. I'm already at the point where I simply couldn't do the last two language labs; I ended up getting the answer key and just trying to hear the words that were used to determine the answers presented, and working backwards. I don't what to do about that even after switching to audit. (Which I haven't yet.)