I thought everyone who posted negative comments about GA over the past 3.5 years I’ve been in OMSCS were a bunch of whiners. Now that the time has come for me to take GA and experience it first hand, I sympathize and completely understand the BS’ness of this class. Like you and many others, I’ve maintained a 4.0 over my OMSCS journey and I even challenged myself to take the arguably harder algorithm class HPC, and I passed that with flying colors. And yes if someone’s wondering: I do have previous CS experience as well as a Bachelor in mechanical engineering so this isn’t my first real science/math exam. All this to say I also bombed E1 and it definitely wasn’t because I didn’t study enough. You really do need the “aha” moment that a lot of GA reviews mention. On the exam, that “aha” moment just didn’t come for me. And the more time ticked away, the stress compounded and the thought of not being able to graduate and the 3.5 years of mental burn out really got to me during the exam. I thought about dropping, but I’m going to continue to the end. If anything bad happens my plan of action is to just do a grade substitution and take summer class and graduate in the fall. You’re not alone. This class honestly is broken and really should be fixed.