What Surprised Me About Getting a 3.5
A failed exam, a lakeside run, and what a loss function taught me about my own reactions
I walked out of the first exam in my machine learning program sure it had gone badly. I got a 4.5 out of 6. In Switzerland, 6 is the top mark and 4 is a pass. The second exam felt easier. Several classmates said they’d struggled with it, and I thought I might even have done better than last time.
Then I got a 3.5.
The grade surprised me. My reaction surprised me more.
I’d studied hard. I’d even taken time off work to prepare. I like to think I take things as they come, but I’d quietly expected a better result. When I saw the number, I thought: Well, that went worse than I thought. Then I waited for the disappointment I’d assumed would follow. What came instead was a kind of lightness.
That morning I’d gone for a run along Lake Zurich at Hurden. The sun was coming up through the clouds, and I was happy enough to jump into the air for a photo. It’s easy to feel good when things are going well. I’d often wondered how I’d feel when something I cared about went sideways. A few hours later, I had my answer, at least for that day.
What “I gave it my best” means to me
At school, I hated exams. I’d put off studying and walk into the room knowing exactly what I’d left undone.
This time was different. I took my own notes on neural networks, convolutional networks and reinforcement learning as we covered them in class. I worked through the quizzes and kept coming back to the ideas I wanted to understand better. By exam day I felt calm. I knew how much care I’d put into preparing, and I’d enjoyed the work itself.
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I’d felt something similar a few days earlier at my first natural bodybuilding competition, where I placed third in my category. First place would have been wonderful. But by the time I stepped onstage, I was already doing something I’d wanted to do for years. I loved seeing what months of training and posing practice could add up to. Third place was the cherry on top.
What a grade can and can’t tell me
One thing I love about studying machine learning is that it gives me new ways to think about how I learn.
When a neural network trains, a loss function scores the model’s output against the training objective. Backpropagation then works out how much each weight contributed to that loss, and the optimizer uses those gradients to adjust the weights. The score alone doesn’t tell the model what to change. The gradients do.
My 3.5 is one of four grades in the program. On its own, it tells me how I scored, not what to change. For that, I need to go back through my answers. If I misunderstood a concept, I can revisit it. If I knew the material and misread a question, that’s a different thing to practise. That’s the part of the analogy I like: the score gives me a reason to look, and the marked exam shows me where.
Reinforcement learning raises a different question. There, a reward signal defines what an agent is trying to achieve over time. A grade is one reward signal I care about. But it isn’t the one that kept me coming back to the material. That was the moment when a concept I’d been wrestling with finally clicked. It happened at my desk, weeks before anyone marked my exam.
Finding joy in a setback
I’ve been curious about what goes on in my own mind since I was a teenager. Later, in the Gurdjieff–Ouspensky tradition, I came across the practice of self-remembering: noticing yourself in the middle of your own experience. I honestly don’t know whether the lightness that morning came from zazen, from running again, or from years of paying attention to my reactions. What interested me was the gap between how I expected to react and how I actually felt. For me, that’s what mindfulness looked like that day. It wasn’t about feeling calm. It was about noticing.
I often come back to two lines from Walt Whitman: “I celebrate myself” and “When I give, I give myself.” I think of them when I dance, practise a pose, share a clip on Instagram, or write about a disappointing exam. Each is a chance to give a bit of myself as I am in that moment. Today, that includes a guy who got a 3.5 and was surprised by how cheerful he still felt.
I’d still take a better grade. But I’m glad I got to find out what it feels like when I don’t get one. I could think, Well, that went worse than I thought, and still be the guy who’d been jumping by the lake that morning.
