So I got my grades (a copule of weeks ago actually), and it was not as glorious as I had hoped. I got a B in Micro and B+ in Econometrics. The latter doesn't matter since I don't have to take a prelim in it, but I realy thought I would do better in Micro. For those of ou who don't know, in grad school, some sort of an A means that you are in the top half of the class, and some sort of a B means you are in the bottom half. A C+ means pack your bags and get a job.
So my performance last quarter was not exacly stellar, but hopefully I will learn how to improve upo it next quarter. I have basically adopted a totally new strategy for this quarter. This time it is to spend as much time as possible working through the problem sets on my own and not resorting to the answer keys unless absolutely necessary. Last quarter I adopted the policy of refering to the answer keys to save time--in reality it fools you into thinking that you understand the material when in fact you do not understand it well enough to reproduce it on an exam. But I used the excuse that I did not have as much of a math background as my colleagues so I needed to take a peek as the answer keys because I could not arrive at the answers on my own. Now I've kicked that crutch out from under me (in retrospect it was a lousy excuse anyway). I guess we'll find out in two months whether or not it worked.