The Long Road

12/18/2003 Archived Entry: "Obligatory"

Well, that was that. 3b CS come and gone or at least I hope it’s gone. I’m still holding onto the thought that I may be one of those few unfortunate 17 people who failed cs341. As I have mentioned in a post or two previously, this term has definitely been the most difficult one yet and has most likely shot my 4 term streak of increasing averages to bits and pieces.

All this because of cs341 which had the toughest material, toughest assignments, toughest midterm, AND toughest final I have ever seen. It seems like quite a few others have felt the same way based on the large amount of complaining and discussion on the course newsgroup.

Anyways, exams are the bane of my, and your, existence. Not only are they incredibly high-pressure situations but a bad exam can throw off a whole term’s worth of good marks and a good exam can negate little-to-no work done for the course. Then there’s also the fact that most students have learnt to “study to the exam”. Just look at old exams, memorize some of the problems you’ve done on your assignments and hope that those same problems will show up on the exam you’re writing. More often than not, this seems to work because there’re only a limited number of questions they can ask based on the material that was taught. So really, get lucky enough and you don’t have to know any of the concepts behind your classes, just memorize some meaningless facts and write ‘em down. So much of an exam is based on luck, like if you did a practice question that gets asked again, or if you happen go to a review session where an exam question happens to be taken up and you happen to bring that solution in on your fact sheet. There must be a better way to assign marks, just seems like no one’s found one yet. I was about to say something about NP-complete with regards to that…oh well.

Replies: 8 comments

so ... is an exam that you can memorize set problem types for better or worse than one where you sit back and regurgitate memorized facts and how would that compare to exams where you don't do either of those but you walk into the exam, they give you a case study and you simply write a report for it (those ones were the trickiest, but at least they didn't require studying) ... sure exams could be a horrible way to test your learning of material ... but until someone comes up with a better idea, i guess we're stuck with them ... until you graduate that is

Posted by melpie @ 12/18/2003 09:38 AM EST

It always seems to come down to one course...just as Thai doubts his performance in cs341...I fear to find out my mark in BIOL4106...:(

Posted by dAN @ 12/18/2003 04:56 PM EST

Exams are over........... and the marks are in. HURRAY for another successful year!!

Posted by Anonymous @ 12/18/2003 10:48 PM EST

I really don't like writing exams mostly because they're completely subjective. Granted no exam is truly objective but writing ones are so much more "up to the prof" how well you do. He could not like your writing style or your argument or whatnot and give you a bad mark. Or if he's like my econ 220 prof, all you'd have to do is write gibberish while every once in a while hitting a few buzzwords he used in class and you'd do fine. I've found that with most of my econ/bus classes, there's no studying at all needed. As long as you can BS coherently for a few hundred words you'll do fine.

Posted by Rayne @ 12/19/2003 04:33 AM EST

yeah .. that was the beauty with business exams ... you literally didn't have to study ... with the exception of some finance courses ... it made the exam period much nicer ... and you know you'd always do fine ... but then again, it's really hard to do great .... three cheers for the business b!

Posted by melpie @ 12/19/2003 09:20 AM EST

Pretty much all my exams were just factual.......... I had 2 that were pure mulitple choice, so the prof didn't really have a say in your Exam mark if he liked you or not. And the rest were Scenario type exams where you were either right or wrong and no real in between.

Posted by Anonymous @ 12/19/2003 02:56 PM EST

sometimes I wonder why I've subjected myself to such an incredibly ridiculously demanding major. I mean our exams require us to be creative and apply what we know to solve new problems. Maybe CS-ers aren't really all that smart in the first place =D

Posted by Rayne @ 12/20/2003 05:07 AM EST

1

Posted by 1 @ 05/06/2005 02:27 PM EST