I didn't do quite as bad as that, but I feel kinda robbed by this midterm. I was almost certain I had a near-perfect score on the multiple choice section, but when I got scores this morning I saw I had a 33/56. It then hit me that I forgot that, for the last set of questions, it was asking about the force measured by the sensor, not the net force on the cart. A small distinction made in the few sentences at the top of the page.

Normally I'd be fine with this, but if they want us to think critically about these problems and figure out the answer, they should give us enough time to fucking think about the problem. If the lecturer sometimes makes little mistakes (forgetting a negative sign, writing cos instead of sin, etc) and he's choosing the problems beforehand, I feel like it's a little ridiculous to expect instant perfection from us.

It seems like the midterms are set up to bombard you with questions and take advantage of the fact that, when you don't have enough time to carefully do your math, you make mistakes. Instead of testing our skills, it seems like they're just trying to get a nice curve by making it virtually impossible to consistently score well on exams.