Stockholm Syndrome in Statistics Class!

Rescinding my positive feedback and writing a scathing RateMyProf review.

In September of this year, I was indoctrinated into the cult of university data science. I enjoyed my grade 12 data management class—aside from the Excel Spreadsheets section, which I now love—and figured this shouldn’t be too hard.

For some time, it really wasn’t hard at all. But come a frigid Friday night at the beginning of December, I would emerge from an exam with tear drops freezing to my cheeks as they fell, sobbing on the phone that I was convinced I’d just failed this exam.

I will preface by saying I survived my high school math classes on sheer luck and osmosis alone. I liked to draw British hedgehogs in the margins of my notebooks, lost my textbooks two years in a row (for the entire semester), and persevered only because I enjoyed puzzles and “reasoned” my way through questions. It’s not that I inherently “understood” math because I spent the two years prior using my lunch periods to review practice questions and fighting my way through word problems.

I knew what it took to work for my grades (sort of). I knew I couldn’t waltz into a university math class with the same anti-homework and pro-"good vibes” mentality I held in grades 11 and 12. It might have worked then, but I had to be careful now.

This professor had decent ratings when I first signed up for the course. She had purple hair, gingerbread house and nutcracker tattoos, and wore mushroom dresses. She was literally everything that should not have been threatening, and yet the entire lecture was horrified of her.

I was SO defensive of this class. I was working overtime on the public relations front. I maintained that the people complaining about their grades just weren’t doing the work because *I* was doing the work and I was fine! Sure, I was genuinely terrified of asking this professor a single question because I’d watched her snap at students for asking for clarification during our 5-minute lecture rest. Surely they were just asking stupid questions, right?

I had students in OTHER courses telling me what terrible reviews everyone had of my professor. How rude she was in emails (I was too afraid to email her myself for proof), how unfairly she’d marked assignments, and how she snapped at students in other courses (to be fair, the door was blocked by a sea of people and we were trapped in our lecture hall). I was convinced this was all a smear campaign because really wasn’t that bad.

Yeah, no, it actually was that bad.

Come this Friday night in December, I had done well on all four assignments and the midterm. I was confident. I did the practice questions and read the textbook for once in my academic career. God rest my naive soul. While the rest of my class began their exam at 7pm, I was assigned to a different building and started around 5:30, finishing at 8:15. I fear I would not have made it out alive if I had to continue that hellspawn of an exam until 10pm.

I handed in a data science exam with a trembling hand, trying to suppress the full body tremours I was experiencing from the sheer horror I’d just gone through. That aforementioned confidence was boosted during the multiple choice. And then the eight pages of “short” answer questions that just had four subsections to each. I’d prepared myself only to be met with questions that seemed like they should have been for an entirely different course. I had perfect attendance, submitted assignments early, and participated only to be slapped in the face by an exam worth almost half my grade.

Stockholm Syndrome wore off pretty quickly after that.

That night, I joked that I’d failed the exam because so many of the questions were left blank. I questioned my entire future! Silly me! I was terrified to admit that I didn’t think I even passed the exam because I thought it was still my fault. But to realise that no matter how much I’d prepared, it still wouldn’t have mattered because the rest of my class couldn’t even finish the exam and handed in even emptier exam papers was both liberating and frustrating. Other people did worse than I did. That didn’t make me feel any better.

It was never personal! It was never about keeping a positive attitude and grinding out that Python. It was never about setting myself apart from other students with my “study habits” because we were all left out to freeze in the end. I couldn’t excuse the professor’s inappropriate comments and demeanour.

The worst thing to find out (after I promised myself I wasn’t going to look at my exam grade and then accidentally clicked on the email thinking it was a grade for a different class. Oops!) was that I didn’t even fail the exam. Logic deduces that the questions that were completely unrelated to the course material had been scrapped during grading. What did I even go through all of that for? Character building? Inspiration for a scathing Substack article?

She’s been left with a 1.9/5 average review on RateMyProfessor that continues to plummet by the day. Most of the comments refer to her as “passive-aggressive” but passive quite literally does not apply here. She was akin to a rabid chihuahua. I was the exact archetype to get rabies thinking I was different from everyone else who was bitten.

I’ll do continue to well in the rest of my math classes out of pure spite.