It has been a long time since I’ve taken a thumping on a quiz—years, well, decades actually. But Klasowka #5 did a number on me. Unprepared as I knew I was, nevertheless the first page surprised me, stunned me, stupefied me. Initially perfectly clueless, and I mean both clueless and perfectly, I turned to the second page in search of a question I had any confidence whatsoever in answering. The returned quiz indicates quite a bloodletting, multiple shivings, now dried, revealing a loss of twenty points on the first page alone, with only six pristine responses of twenty items. On the second page, I dropped fourteen points filling in the remaining blanks, a nasty gauntlet of genitives and locatives. Somehow I managed the last half, the translation portion, with a minimum of damage, surrendering only an additional six and a half points, for a total of forty demerits. A forty-point loss over a mere three pages, earning me the worst quiz grade of my non-degree career, a B-. Which indicates one of two things: that Polish is a difficult language, with enormous opportunities for error; or, rumors of grade inflation in the modern academy are well founded. Much of both, I suspect.
