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First exam today. Went well. I must admit to feeling a little guilty though because I did desperately need the extra time I got pretty much under false pretenses.
There were two nice friendly list-of-definitions questions for the first part which I ate without too much difficulty (OS and Java).
ML was more of a pain than it should have been had I actually been paying any attention to my morning's reading, but I managed about half marks, I think. (The first one I could have done merrily if I'd actually paid attention about how to do an iterative-deepening search of a tree, but I hadn't, so I did the second one, where I only lost ten marks for being too incompetent to visualise how to add bits to a function you haven't even seen.)
Discrete Maths was the predictable washout; slightly less than it could have been, though, because the set question probably got me about four or five marks from random wittering about bijections. I actually answered about half the question's worth of it, but I know that some of that is utter tripe, so I don't expect half the marks.
Java was predictably Horribly Badly Set - the questions were 'go and write a program to do foo', where 'foo' was a perfectly reasonable hour-and-a-half's work but not physically possible to type out a program for in half an hour. This was why I needed my extra time. It looks like enough people are whining about it that Something Will Be Done, though. (Which is kind of a shame as I finished it and didn't go and polish some other questions that probably needed it, but hey, I enjoyed getting it done - last line of code right at the last thirty seconds, printer still running when I was out of time!) For the first question of the two, I don't think anyone had even attempted to teach us how to do the things it was asking for - they're in the first tick of next year! (So I did the second, which was straightforward and had a UML diagram and stuff, and the only thing we hadn't really learnt that we were expected to remember was file processing. It could have done with a UI, but I made it all read from files instead.) Whilst I finished it, it was full of typos, hopelessly undocumented (about three comments all told) and had inadequate quantities of 'import' statements in entirely random places, but as they're probably messing around with the question, goodness knows.
Operating Systems had two pretty nice questions; the first one had more 'what does this look like in memory' things which I can't necessarily remember accurately and the second one was on process scheduling which I liked and hence remember, so I went for that one. I answered all of it, but not in any great depth, and glossed a bit on the exact details, so maybe 3/4 marks.
Finding the room included some fun, too; not only was it not where we thought it was (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tienelle arrived here after his own exam had finished to wake me up in case I was asleep and ended up having to shepherd a stressed Chessypig around), it wasn't where it was meant to be either. Eventually I ended up in the same place as I had my progress test, which was okay, but Hot. I pitied the poor invigilator, who looked about sixteen years old and had to wear a gown. Hopefully the actual room will be cooler.
Just a shame about tomorrow's exam, which I thought was on Wednesday and hence am Woefully Underprepared for. I think I'd just keel over if I tried to do any work now, though; revising in the morning seemed to work quite well, as I'm bound to be awake early again anyway.
There were two nice friendly list-of-definitions questions for the first part which I ate without too much difficulty (OS and Java).
ML was more of a pain than it should have been had I actually been paying any attention to my morning's reading, but I managed about half marks, I think. (The first one I could have done merrily if I'd actually paid attention about how to do an iterative-deepening search of a tree, but I hadn't, so I did the second one, where I only lost ten marks for being too incompetent to visualise how to add bits to a function you haven't even seen.)
Discrete Maths was the predictable washout; slightly less than it could have been, though, because the set question probably got me about four or five marks from random wittering about bijections. I actually answered about half the question's worth of it, but I know that some of that is utter tripe, so I don't expect half the marks.
Java was predictably Horribly Badly Set - the questions were 'go and write a program to do foo', where 'foo' was a perfectly reasonable hour-and-a-half's work but not physically possible to type out a program for in half an hour. This was why I needed my extra time. It looks like enough people are whining about it that Something Will Be Done, though. (Which is kind of a shame as I finished it and didn't go and polish some other questions that probably needed it, but hey, I enjoyed getting it done - last line of code right at the last thirty seconds, printer still running when I was out of time!) For the first question of the two, I don't think anyone had even attempted to teach us how to do the things it was asking for - they're in the first tick of next year! (So I did the second, which was straightforward and had a UML diagram and stuff, and the only thing we hadn't really learnt that we were expected to remember was file processing. It could have done with a UI, but I made it all read from files instead.) Whilst I finished it, it was full of typos, hopelessly undocumented (about three comments all told) and had inadequate quantities of 'import' statements in entirely random places, but as they're probably messing around with the question, goodness knows.
Operating Systems had two pretty nice questions; the first one had more 'what does this look like in memory' things which I can't necessarily remember accurately and the second one was on process scheduling which I liked and hence remember, so I went for that one. I answered all of it, but not in any great depth, and glossed a bit on the exact details, so maybe 3/4 marks.
Finding the room included some fun, too; not only was it not where we thought it was (
tienelle arrived here after his own exam had finished to wake me up in case I was asleep and ended up having to shepherd a stressed Chessypig around), it wasn't where it was meant to be either. Eventually I ended up in the same place as I had my progress test, which was okay, but Hot. I pitied the poor invigilator, who looked about sixteen years old and had to wear a gown. Hopefully the actual room will be cooler.Just a shame about tomorrow's exam, which I thought was on Wednesday and hence am Woefully Underprepared for. I think I'd just keel over if I tried to do any work now, though; revising in the morning seemed to work quite well, as I'm bound to be awake early again anyway.
no subject
fun update a n v = (fn k => if (k=n) then v else a(k));
Took me ages trying to work it out... you don't need to know what 'a' is or how it works, only that you can use it. It has terrible performance which means you know you've got the right answer when you get to the final part of the question.