Why not give up?
Sure, I did better than 2/3 of the class that I'm in. Sure, I got a solid C, without the curve. But, it really really sucks when I can argue my points till I'm blue in the face and it makes no difference.
I did 6 points better than last quarter, and I studied my butt off.
Was the test "harder"? No. Did I not learn the material? Of course I learned it. Then why did I do so poorly?
You really want to know my opinion? It's a weed out class. I was discussing this with Nala last night before I went to sleep... the questions are a) misleading, b) written poorly, and c) downright unreadable when you're under time constraint.
It was, and continues to be, apparently, a 1.5 hour midterm in a 48 minute timeslot. There is no room for checking for missed punctuation, mixed up variable names, function calls, etc. And switching assumptions (printed on page 1) halfway through a multi-part problem that's printed over pages 1, 2, and 3... that's just plain shifty.
No, I'm not saying there werent a couple speed demons in this class who got everything done in record time and got near 100%... I'm saying there were a LOT of good programmers who got left behind. Way behind.