Huzzah for exams.

[chess]

As I confidently predicted, today's paper went fine. However, I still feel rather like I cheated somehow, because it only went fine because I revised the Exact Correct Thing To Revise this morning, which I feel is almost certainly the effect of the people who are praying for me... credit should also go to tienelle who explained my Data Structures and Algorithms course to me far better than the notes or the textbook managed (or, indeed, my supervisor, who suffered from English Not First Language problems).

Question One, I thought about attempting, and then when I actually got around to doing it I thought 'No, actually, I don't know what a D flip-flop *is*', and as most of the question was about the specifics of D flip-flops, that rather ruled out answering it.

Question Two is the question which I revised quite thoroughly this morning for no good reason. It was about Huffman codes and arithmetic coding. I would have done even better on it had I remembered how to deal with log2 (2^foo + (2^2)^bar) gracefully, but hopefully only by two marks at most. I did this question second, and dealt with the bits on arithmetic encoding last. I expect 15-19 marks on this one, depending how many marks they were offering for 'assumptions for optimally compact code' (who with the what now?) and algebra.

Question Three is the question on which I produced piles of steaming bullshit, but after I had done all the questions I could actually answer well, it was what I was left with that I could give some kind of waffly answer to all the parts of. So I did. I'm not expecting more than about 10 marks because my whole answer can be summed up as 'waffle waffle waffle'.

Question Four I thought 'yay, trivial Prolog stuff' and won at it. If I don't get 20 marks, it will be because the examiners got lost somewhere in my reams of prolog evaluation and/or they wanted more than one line for five marks for part (d) (but that would have been a huge and terrible evaluation and I'd already spotted the pattern, damn it).

Question Five I was a little wary of because it was stated in rather an informal way and I wasn't entirely sure what some of the little bits were getting at, but the only bit I was very unsure of was (b)(i) which was only two marks out of the question. 12-20 marks depending on how good my guesses at what they wanted were.

Question Six was another 'yay, here's the easy question', although I couldn't remember whether x/(minus infinity) was zero or not a number. 15-19 marks depending on how lousy my solution to the last part actually was. But mostly it was all about Floating Point, and that's nice and easy and fun.

I didn't do Seven, Eight or Nine. Seven I didn't do because it had the words 'rigorous proof' in, and also because I could not for the life of me remember any undecidable problems which were not the Halting Problem. Eight I didn't do because it had the irritating 'calculate the maximum resolution needed by a foo, stating your assumptions' and I couldn't even remember a reasonable assumption for Cones In Eye, let alone how to put it all together, although if I'd been desperate for a question I could have got some marks out of it and the other parts. Nine I didn't do because even though it was basically the cryptographic signing thing which ToothyWiki does, I was less confident of the details of that than I was of the AI question stuff.

I should probably do some last-minute revision for the next few papers, since today's last-minute revision worked so well, but first - Spod!

Comments

Prayer Changes Things

[zebbiejohnson.livejournal.com]

I think that this feeling of having cheated because of prayer etc was related to one of the issues that I had most trouble with when people were evangelising to me in Durham:

No God
If I don't do well, it is my fault. If I do well, it is my fault. The consequences of my revising or not fall almost totally on me.

Yes God
If I don't do well, it is my fault. Or God tripped me up deliberately, which He couldn't do when I didn't believe in Him, and is very demotivating when revising hard. If I do well, it isn't really my fault, it is because God did it. This seems unfair, as He doesn't take the blame from my parents in the bad-case scenario but gets all the credit for my hard work in the good-case.

I was never able to find anyone who could make this situation seem better/more fair/more appealing - tbh even "If you believe in God and the prayer system, you might be able to bump your marks up by prayer" did also seem a bit rude and take away the point and merit in good marks through working hard.

However, I also know the uneasy kinda-cheating feeling you are talking about well - I had a true photographic memory until I was starting to hit SATS so I always had the book with my pencilled-in margin notes with me, even in closed-book exams.

Re: Prayer Changes Things

[zebbiejohnson.livejournal.com]

Also it seemed a bit patronising that you only do well because God lets you - what about effort and talent?. (addendum to comment above)

Re: Prayer Changes Things

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I remember feeling cheating if I looked at past papers and deduced what would come up this year. But it's *not*, it's publically available information, and no-one *asked* us not to use it.

This seems unfair, as He doesn't take the blame from my parents in the bad-case scenario but gets all the credit for my hard work in the good-case.

Don't look to me for disagreement. But I can repeat arguments I've heard, for example:

(1) Compare God to a parent. Parents are supposed to help[1] their children and if a child has non-supportive parents the answer is to find him someone to turn to, not to reject your own help. Also, they don't do anything you couldn't do, just let you realise your potential.

(2) If you fail, its because you didn't believe hard enough, or because you're destined for something else. Or, possibly, because peopel somewhere are gay, but I find that one disturbing.

(3) God sends help to everyone, and its more choice whether to receive it or not.

[1] Not in terms of cheating, but in terms of encouragement, general advice, specific advice beforehand if they think its appropriate, etc.

Re: Prayer Changes Things

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

I remember feeling cheating if I looked at past papers and deduced what would come up this year. But it's *not*, it's publically available information, and no-one *asked* us not to use it.

I always feel nice and smug when that happens, and it happened a lot this year. You're supposed to do that!

If God[1] knew what was on the paper and somehow by divine intervention told someone to revise the exact same thing, then God should be hauled up before the University exams committee for breach of conduct, as nobody is supposed to do that!

[1] Assuming existence, something I don't usually do :)

Re: Prayer Changes Things

[atreic.livejournal.com]

While I agree with you that the no god scenario seems fairer than the yes god one, your no god scenario is wrong, in that in any exam system there are huge amounts of luck. If you don't do well, it may be that the questions on the course you didn't take were really easy, and the questions on the course you were best at covered exactly the bits you found hardest to understand. Or you might get ill. I don't think the absence of a deity makes exam performance exactly corralated with effort.