I failed my first exam, and i couldnt be happier.

I'm a first-year computer science student at Coventry University. Two weeks ago i did an exam on networking virtualisation and implementation, the way this would be graded was through submission of a word document showing things like subnet routes, DNS conifs and stuff like that. I use my laptop for my work, and they allowed me to use it for the exam provided an admin oversaw me, so fast forward to the end of the exam, we had 3 minutes to submit before the deadline was up, so i saved my work locally and filed it with around a minute to spare. Now i didn't feel confident on this at all, i didn't finish all of the questions, and I'm pretty sure i was going to fail, but the relief that the exam was over was enough to make me happy. Fast forward a further two weeks and i log into my student portal to check my grades, they are blank, not marked or even started to be marked. I thought to myself this is rather odd so i opened the submitted word file and it was completely blank, a BLANK template of the questions!! So i did what any other student would do in my place, i panicked. I spent the next two days sending Emails to my tutor, my lecturer and my universities registry. Still, i didn't get anything from them, All of this was caused because it didn't save on my machine correctly, this was because i didn't have a licence for word or 365, looking back i should have converted the file to a google doc file and done it from there. Fast forward to Monday, my tutor pulls me outside, and i talk with him. I convey my concerns to him about how it wasn't really my fault, and it was merely a mistake, i was in a right mess, but he did a great job of putting me at ease, he's seen that the file was blank and has allowed a resubmission of the exam in 3 weeks during my break. Throughout around an hour, he spoke to me one on one and said about how life is full of "**** ups" and that its okay to mess up as long as you learn, now i know its cliche and generic to say that but i feel like this is the first time that this is truly applicable. I now get a further two weeks to revise as well as looking over criteria for my next exam that's next week.

So what did i take away from this situation? Well, it's about how you recover from situations like that, sure i could have spent a bunch of time and energy fighting the regime to see if i could get it re-marked, all while kicking and stomping my feet, but what's the point? Lesson learned if anything i feel more confident than i did before. Now i feel calm and collected with time to sink my head into the criteria, and i understand that not everyone is this lucky. Still, i wanted to share this with others to let them know that if you find your self in a similar situation, please contact your tutor and lecturer, don't go straight to the top kicking and screaming.

So first off lets be glad it happened in 1st year (and hopefully you'll learn).

Microsoft 365 is free for students so get it!

Also NEVER submit a .docx file again, these are not ISO and can change computer to computer, export to PDF every time, there really is no excuse for not doing this.

This is entirely your own fault and quite frankly I think the Uni should fail you and cap the re-submission at 40 (but im not module conveyor).

Yes you majorly f'd up, not once but the entire process for this course work, hopefully you learn and improve.

If you had gone right to the top kicking and screaming they would have told you to get lost, I can only hope the marker is allowing you to resit as this is a first year module and hence doesn't count towards your degree and just wants to make sure your learning the content.

I can assure you that the lesson has most certainly been learnt, I'm very grateful to have the opportunity to re-try this exam. The PDF conversion is certainly the correct way to go about this and from now on that's how I'll be doing it for all word-based exams. The reason i was talking about the whole kicking and screaming thing is that there were a few people that have done that, whether it be for late submission by a few minutes or to dispute grades, a few people were rather distraught over how hard the exam was, some girls in my class were crying, others were saying that they would change degree if further exams were like that. Granted there was some more context as to why the exam was hard for us in general but i didn't think it was necessary to go into.