Am I too smart, or am I too dumb for my own good?

So this is my first year at UVU. I had recently taken the placement test which landed me in Intermediate Algebra. The unfortunate thing is that since it has been over 10 years since I finished my last math class as a senior in high school, i have forgotten alot. My professor also speaks AND writes 7.2 to the second power times faster than I can think, and I am so lost! When I took the placement test for math, I guessed on 96.333% of the multiple choice answers, even on the arithmatic section. And still I recieved a high enough score to enter Math 1010, due to my superb skills in deductive reasoning on multiple choice tests. That is a very bad thing; I wish that I would have failed miserably! You see, the army is paying for my schooling and giving me a cost of living allowance of $1050/mo. If I drop my class, I will lose my fulltime status and my $1050 a month stipend. It is also too late to add any classes. I wish I would have done crappy on the placement test, taken a history class instead of math this semester, and saved up money to pay for prerequisites in math during spring or summer semester(as the army doesn't pay for prereqs). HELP!!!
This topic is important because there must be other people who are over their heads. I wonder how many people out there pass the multiple choice exams in school, graduate, get out into the real world, and then don't really have a clue. It would be like cheating your way through med school to become a docter. Pretty scary.