Exam woes/rants thread

[ríomhaire]

I know a lot of people have exams right now or, like me, have exams coming up and study can cause a lot of built up agitation so here's a thread we can vent in.

I've started my month of exam study and holy **** I hate linear algebra so much. I don't know whether it's me or the lecturer but I could not follow anything that man said. I just found out on wikipedia what the direct sum

actually meant. I took down so many notes with that symbol in it not knowing what the hell the direct sum actually was. I asked him in class once to define it and he just said it was the direct sum. I asked him what that was and I couldn't follow anything he said. According to wikipedia it's just

A[IMG]http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/2/c/4/2c4995ac00d23d703fc4448f15840c23.png[/IMG]B =
[A 0]
[0 B]

That's ****ing easy. How did I not get that in class? What kind of ass-backwards way did he try to explain it that I couldn't understand that. I hate how he talks
"A linear operator is a thing that takes vectors and spits out stuff."
Don't talk like that in a ****ing maths course. Talk in mathematical terms you ****ing tool. I hate this man.

Strangely he gives good tutorials but terrible lectures.

 

[15357]

In my American History class, I can barely understand the man speak, because he keeps murmuring to himself! He's an Oxford graduate, and I like the professor personally, but I do wish he would stick to a formal classroom plan.

My Understanding Christianity class has 2 problems:

#1. She can't speak the language she teaches in.

#2. The bible is one big cluster**** of migrain-inducing stories and histories.

 

[Dynasty]

Cant remember proper exams really.

I had one exam in my entire 3 years at Uni. And we were allowed to take an A4 sheet of paper in with notes on it, which were supposed to be checked but werent as you walked into the room (so you basically wrote your essay on the notes page and copied it off)...

AND we were given the questions 5 days before the exam itself.

Dont know why we bothered. Amazingly, some people still managed to fail to get 40% and over (ie failed, have to retake).

It sounds like the essay is made stupidly easy as a result, but its actually difficult in some respects. Because you only write down what you think you need before going into the exam, and fail to actually absorb all the reading. So if you dont add your own views based on your reading, which you either havent done or havent actually remembered what you were reading after making your notes, you get penalised big time on the result.

 

[Acepilotf14]

I never study.
I get advanced to perfect scores.
I think I'm okay, really. Although these lack of study skills will screw me in college.

 

[Dan]

Probably not. I got through Mech Eng learning all of the course material the night before an exam. If you are capable of abstract thought, mathematical reasoning, and have a reasonable memory you can pretty much pass any university science/engineering exam after 1 hour of studying/reading Wikipedia.

Essays are even easier because you just need to have a mass of general knowledge (which is easy to accumulate if you are interested in a lot of topics), a small amount of specific knowledge and the ability to recognize patterns and then write your thoughts down coherently. If you really cannot formulate any argument, you can just argue about the validity of causation which is pretty much the basis for making any argument and then vaguely tie that all back to the topic at hand.

 

[Mellish]

My first proper set of exams are coming up end of april that actually mean jackshit, not looking forward to it.

 

[ríomhaire]

I never study.
I get advanced to perfect scores.
I think I'm okay, really. Although these lack of study skills will screw me in college.

I was like that until I got to college. Good luck!

 

[Minister]

I have a structures exam on Thursday for which I need to start revision. I've been maintaining a high 2:1 with only revising one day before the exam. Maybe I'll put more effort into my third and fourth years.

I only have one exam in the summer which is for Management and Management Science module. It's open book and is 90% statistics so therefore is going to be ridiculously easy. Makes a change from 7 exams in 8 days last summer.

 

[Stormy]

Only gay lords do exams!

 

[Eejit]

I don't mind exams. I hate coursework. Well, writing up of coursework.

 

[Kaptain H]

I'm just glad I somehow managed to get through all of college and graduate school with only one math class. No idea how that worked out!

 

[Dekstar]

Never had to do any exams, but I'm in my final year of uni, and have a fair bit of coursework to do. I enjoy doing it though, so it's all good.

 

[kineaesth]

Strangely he gives good tutorials but terrible lectures.

Our university has teacher assessments for every single class. If something like that was happening in one of my lectures, I'd make sure to make a note of it. I've had about a week of work for everyone single one of my courses being due, but after tomorrow afternoon I'll finally be free.

Huzzah!

 

[TimoJay]

You guys with your crazy foreign universities that don't have tons of exams are going to fail once you get out in the real world. Everyone knows that real-world problems consist of question written on a paper and you never have access to the internet or other people for assistance.

 

[kineaesth]

You guys with your crazy foreign universities that don't have tons of exams are going to fail once you get out in the real world. Everyone knows that real-world problems consist of question written on a paper and you never have access to the internet or other people for assistance.

Also in the real world you are often asked to write a cohesive but still content rich essay on a topic that you have been studying in about an hour and in the real world you are judged on your ability to do this

 

[AJ Rimmer]

You guys with your crazy foreign universities that don't have tons of exams are going to fail once you get out in the real world. Everyone knows that real-world problems consist of question written on a paper and you never have access to the internet or other people for assistance.

Indeed! Like chatting up women!

"What was John Locke's political ideology?"
"The state should look after the individual rights and interests of its citizens, those rights being the right to property, life and freedom. Thomas Hobbes had similar ideas but remained skeptical to the nature of man and argued that the state must supress its citizens for their own good, and revolts were only legitimate if successful, since that would render the sovereign state incompetent to fulfill its duty to its people, IE to control them."
"Good enough, I'll sleep with you."

 

[KiplingsCat]

My thermodynamics lecturer insisted all year on making us take notes at the speed of light. As a result of this, I could never listen to what she was saying. Now I have an unintelligible set of notes, and a book on which all the notes she gave were based (ie stolen from), and an exam in a month, which only four people passed last year. The exam questions are nigh on impossible. I'm going a bit crazy I feel like I could get this stuff if only I had access to a good set of notes. It's not actually that hard, it's just been taught really badly and there's so much of it I can barely get my head around it.

 

[dfc05]

Probably not. I got through Mech Eng learning all of the course material the night before an exam. If you are capable of abstract thought, mathematical reasoning, and have a reasonable memory you can pretty much pass any university science/engineering exam after 1 hour of studying/reading Wikipedia.

I would actually take a Chemical, Electrical, or Materials Science Engineering exam before you make claims about every engineering. Most people, including very smart people, will not learn how to design a chemical reactor overnight. If I pulled out the 4 people in our department who ended up with 4.0's and asked them if they could pass "after 1 hour of studying/reading Wikipedia", they would all find that utterly ridiculous. I guess if your definition of passing is a 60, you might get by. But good luck getting an A (or actually finishing the entire exam in the allotted time without doing the homework). I did great on ChE exams without "studying" much, but this was only after spending long hours during the preceding weeks, doing homework in the middle of the night with a bottle of sweet tea and a package of gummy worms, feeling like I wanted to die.

People always claim their engineering is just as difficult as any other engineering. I don't know much about MechE, but I'm TA'ing civil engineering and I (and every other chemical engineer who is now a civil engineering grad student) can guarantee you that if I had taken CivE as an undergrad I would've been at least 10 times less miserable and stressed out. Likewise, after being in a Materials Science Engineering TEM course, I'm so glad we don't have exams, because if I had to attempt to go around solving Schrodinger's Equation with quantum mechanical corrections (it's so beyond me I don't even know if that's the correct way to describe it), I would fail. I have a ton of respect for the prof of that course.

Anyways, regarding thermodynamics (and physical chemistry, which is partly the same): That is one of those classes where I felt like everything I was writing was just me making up random crap, but it somehow by some twisted freakish demon magic ended up being right. Had no clue what I was doing. All I remember now is something called "the finger method", that equations of state for compressible gases are terrible awful things, and this story about my prof wasting years of his life trying to get a thermodynamically impossible amount of energy out of an engine. They say that the first time you take thermo, you have no idea what's going on. The second time you take thermo, you think you've got it figured out. The third time you take it, you realize that everything you thought you knew the second time was completely wrong.

I'd blame the profs for those classes, but I seriously think it was the actual topic itself that was the problem. There was however this one time where my physical chemistry prof assigned homework based on an electrochemistry reaction in a phenolphthalein solution. We started working on our homework only to find that we needed to know the pH. We get to class the day the homework is due, and this is almost word-for-word what he said: "For this problem, you needed to know the pH. Based on the PINKNESS of the solution, I would say it was something like 8 or 9." It was obvious he was just making up crap to cover for giving us a retarded problem. Every single class was awful.

 

[Shift]

I have a programming exam at the end of April. I took a look at the notes and my brain just died a little. It seriously makes ZERO sence to me. Probably coupled with the fact that i didn't attend a single lecture this year mainly because java is the most stupid concept ever invented and I'd rather blow my brains out than have to sit through another 2 hours of it.

 

[Dan]

I would actually take a Chemical, Electrical, or Materials Science Engineering exam before you make claims about every engineering. Most people, including very smart people, will not learn how to design a chemical reactor overnight. If I pulled out the 4 people in our department who ended up with 4.0's and asked them if they could pass "after 1 hour of studying/reading Wikipedia", they would all find that utterly ridiculous. I guess if your definition of passing is a 60, you might get by. But good luck getting an A (or actually finishing the entire exam in the allotted time without doing the homework). I did great on ChE exams without "studying" much, but this was only after spending long hours during the preceding weeks, doing homework in the middle of the night with a bottle of sweet tea and a package of gummy worms, feeling like I wanted to die.

People always claim their engineering is just as difficult as any other engineering. I don't know much about MechE, but I'm TA'ing civil engineering and I (and every other chemical engineer who is now a civil engineering grad student) can guarantee you that if I had taken CivE as an undergrad I would've been at least 10 times less miserable and stressed out. Likewise, after being in a Materials Science Engineering TEM course, I'm so glad we don't have exams, because if I had to attempt to go around solving Schrodinger's Equation with quantum mechanical corrections (it's so beyond me I don't even know if that's the correct way to describe it), I would fail. I have a ton of respect for the prof of that course.

Anyways, regarding thermodynamics (and physical chemistry, which is partly the same): That is one of those classes where I felt like everything I was writing was just me making up random crap, but it somehow by some twisted freakish demon magic ended up being right. Had no clue what I was doing. All I remember now is something called "the finger method", that equations of state for compressible gases are terrible awful things, and this story about my prof wasting years of his life trying to get a thermodynamically impossible amount of energy out of an engine. They say that the first time you take thermo, you have no idea what's going on. The second time you take thermo, you think you've got it figured out. The third time you take it, you realize that everything you thought you knew the second time was completely wrong.

I'd blame the profs for those classes, but I seriously think it was the actual topic itself that was the problem. There was however this one time where my physical chemistry prof assigned homework based on an electrochemistry reaction in a phenolphthalein solution. We started working on our homework only to find that we needed to know the pH. We get to class the day the homework is due, and this is almost word-for-word what he said: "For this problem, you needed to know the pH. Based on the PINKNESS of the solution, I would say it was something like 8 or 9." It was obvious he was just making up crap to cover for giving us a retarded problem. Every single class was awful.

A pass is 51/100 or greater as defined by my university, and like I said "IF you are capable of abstract thought, mathematical reasoning, and have a decent memory". I still stand by that. In terms of difficulty, Mech Eng had the highest rejection rate (ratio of students accepted to students applying). The consensus was that Eng phys, chemical, then electrical and mechanical were most difficult. Materials somewhere in the middle. industrial and civil regularly are rated the easiest. And yes, mechanical engineers are required to take, fluids, thermo, materials, electrical and at least basic chemistry, on top of lots and lots of math, vibrations, process control, statics and dynamics, and design.

 

[Minister]

I would concur with Civil being one of the easiest just by comparing with what I do to some of what my mates do. Control Engineering? Give me a pile of concrete and dirt anyday thank you very much.

 

[dfc05]

A pass is 51/100 or greater as defined by my university, and like I said "IF you are capable of abstract thought, mathematical reasoning, and have a decent memory". I still stand by that. In terms of difficulty, Mech Eng had the highest rejection rate (ratio of students accepted to students applying). The consensus was that Eng phys, chemical, then electrical and mechanical were most difficult. Materials somewhere in the middle. industrial and civil regularly are rated the easiest. And yes, mechanical engineers are required to take, fluids, thermo, materials, electrical and at least basic chemistry, on top of lots and lots of math, vibrations, process control, statics and dynamics, and design.

Ah, I tend to think of 70+ as passing, but for 51+ I would tend to (but not always) agree with you. Even classes that rely mostly on memorization (organic chemistry) still need a lot of practice, if only because you have to memorize 100+ different reactions/mechanisms. I'm always a fan of the "go to class and do all your homework" route.

My intro to materials and electrical engineering classes were both really awful, stupid classes. They usually had the crappy profs teach those. All my electrical engineering prof did in class was have us watch youtube videos and give us the answers to the homework the class BEFORE it was due. I'm not even kidding. His course "website" was a bunch of plain text html files with (1) links to the youtube videos, (2) the homework questions (but if you wanted the answers ahead of time, you actually needed to show up to class), and (3) all the questions that could potentially be on the exam. All of the exam questions were short answer where you memorized crap out of the book. Some of his questions were "List three of the Chapter 5 objectives," so you would have to memorize what each chapter number was about. Every few years, on the final he would be forced to assign ONE problem that actually involved a calculation (usually about 3 lines worth of algebra). This problem was called "the ABET problem" because in order for the department to get ABET accreditation, he needed to show them an example of a calculation problem on an exam. If you happened to take his class during ABET year, then he would email the class the calculation problem they had to do before they took the exam. Truly the most stupid class I've ever been forced to endure. Either you memorized the answers to 50+ random questions and got a 100, or you sat there in the exam like "I can only remember two of the objectives listed at the beginning of Chapter 5" or, God forbid, "I can't remember whether Chapter 5 was the DC Circuits chapter or the AC Circuits chapter?!"

 

[Shyam]

I am studying Law. On my third year. First year Law was enough. I crammed in the last few weeks without losing much sleep and got 70% and above through my 3 Law papers. But 2nd year just upped the ante. I remember studying into 2 AM, waking up in 6 AM for the Exams, and I did weeks of prep before that too.

This year, I am not leaving things to chance, I have been studying from the first day itself, and keeping up with my readings.

 

[Letters]

I have absolutely murdered every single exam, paper, what-the-****-ever, that has crossed my warpath since I rebooted my college-ing almost a year ago now. I wasn't sure I'd be able to keep it up after that first summer semester, but I just turned into a monster after getting that first little taste of blood. It's sickening.


In short,

Have a nice day.

 

[The Monkey]

Had my exam nine days ago. The questions themselves weren't impossible, but it was a pain to study to, it was so broad. There were four questions, and each of them was in a different subject. So it was political science, macroeconomics, law and cultural geography all in one test.