Perception

And my exams are finally over. The first three papers were packed in a span of three days over the first weekend of the exam period, starting with GEM2901 Reporting Statistics in the Media. Admittedly, I hadn’t spend any time reading through this module’s lecture notes or tutorials in the prior twelve weeks before the study break, and had to rush my revision in the few days before the examination.

Granted, there wasn’t a lot of content to memorise nor concepts to remember, so studying for it was always not going to be a tedious task. I decided to adopt a personally new method of revision untested in the previous semester, which was to summarise the points of each chapter in a mind map sort of fashion. The writing part was tiring, as there were quite a few important points, but the summarising process helped me to memorise key terms as well.

I was rather confident in my preparations, only to be disheartened by a pretty ambiguous GEM2901 paper. The total marks of the paper was 60, equating to 60% of the final grade, so any mistake would be a costly one. Most of the MCQs were straightforward, but the short answer questions were really open to interpretation, and I can only hope that I interpreted them correctly.

The papers for CS2100 Computer Organisation and CS1102 Data Structures and Algorithms were both on last Monday in that order, and I think I should be able to pass if not do well for both papers. I managed to answer all the questions, but unfortunately made a few careless mistakes (as expected) throughout both papers. I honestly did not study enough for both papers, and if not for the discussions with my peers over questions from the past-year papers, I’ll most likely be in a worst-off position.

An interesting incident arose after the CS1102 paper, and it was a result of some people not shading the OCR form for the true/false questions, instead choosing to write their answers on the paper. The lecturer of the module was inclined to award them the marks anyway, which I felt was terribly unfair, as there were repeated reminders and it was explicitly stated in the instructions that shading the answers was a requirement. It seemed too kind to allow such a careless mistake to go unpunished, and although only seven marks were at stake, I felt it was a matter of principle that they should simply get nothing for their obvious disregard for instructions.

A few other people felt the same way as I did, and voiced it out in the IVLE forum as well, but there wasn’t any response from the lecturer in the end, lending to an uncertainty in his final decision. I shaded all my answers on the OCR form, so I definitely wish that he simply does what is obviously the fair and right thing to do. I would have gone further and emailed him personally with a carbon copy to the dean, but that would perhaps be going too far.

The next and final paper was MNO1001 Management and Organisation, and this was a different kind of paper that I’ve been used to. Notably a 44-mark case study with only two pages for which to write the answer on. I’m not sure if I managed to express my answer clearly or sufficiently, but I certainly used up all the lines provided. The rest were agree/disagree questions testing our knowledge of the management concepts, and I managed to fill them all out with my version of the answers.

It’s three and a half weeks more to the release of the results, and to be honest I can hardly wait. Summer vacation is officially here, and there’s quite a few things that I would like to do. Like the previous December break, I’ll be setting myself some goals that I would like to achieve, but I’ll leave that for another post later this week.