Making the Grade
Smedes York remembers professors and academics at NC State.
Interview on 2012-03-15 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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Having gone to Needham Broughton High School here
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very well prepared. It is an excellent high school, it was an excellent high school at that time,
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and so my freshman year wasn't a repeat
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but it was something that built pretty steadily.
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You can look at the transcript. I'm proud of the transcript. I only made two C's.
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One of them was in electrical engineering, and I know the professor's name there was Smiley
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and during the semester he would give us
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difficult tests, but he had a system. The tests were open book
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and then what you missed he would let you take it and work right and bring it back and he'd give you half credit,
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and you could look at the old quizzes in preparation so a lot of it was not-. It was a difficult subject but you had all that to buoy you up.
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So I got into the exam and he comes in and hands-. I don't know whether he had a bad night or what happened
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but he handed out this exam and everybody just about died.
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I mean we'd never seen this stuff before. [Laughs] When I handed the exam in I knew I had for sure an eight.
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I think I ended up getting a forty-seven, which dropped me from an A-minus to a C-plus.
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The other one was, I don't remember the teacher's name but it was in English composition.
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I thought I had done pretty well in writing and all
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but he gave me a C-plus and I wanted a B-minus.
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I was an engineering student. So I went in there
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and talked to him about maybe a B-minus and he started doing some of this well maybe-and I thought this guy's not an engineer. There's no chance.
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So I forgot that. But I had a lot of really good professors.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.