TheChrisD - Rant Central

Exams, exams, exams…

Halfway through the exam period - well, really 5/6ths of the way through. 5 exams down, and only 1 to go. Anyway, I’m back home in Dunboyne for the gap period between Monday’s Data Structures, and Friday’s Assembly Language. It’s a nice little 3-day stay which helps fulfil the need to not completely forget about the family

Exams so far have been iffy… Starting with Tuesday’s Logic exam. It seemed to go well on the proposition and first order predicate logic, but with Prolog making up 3 of the 10 questions, it was a little “touch and go”. Prolog isn’t my strong point. Mainly as I had absolutely no knowledge of it…

Wednesday brought Probability. It was OK, but there was a lot of R material on the paper, when I could have sworn we were told we did not need to program R on the paper. I hate R. I could never get to grips with it. There are so many things you can’t do as a beginner, yet she was asking us to do for projects. I remember Declan having to go ask on the main R forums how to do something on a project that was set, and they themselves mentioned that it is very advanced stuff.

Thursday was Languages and Computability. Long title FTL. And exam FTL. All I can say is: epic fail. The course really is almost entirely memorising rules and crap. And obviously, I couldn’t memorise the lot. Even worse was that I blanked out in the exam. Well at least there’s going to be at least one day in August next year where I’ll be in college…

Friday had Networks. I’m hoping I managed to pass. 32 multiple choice questions and a 4 mark bonus for talking about some website you know about. The bonus Q was easy enough - I went on about net2ftp. It should impress him as it involves FTP via PHP in a web browser - all components of the course
As for the questions, well a good few of them were random guesses. Although the odds of getting all those right are very slim - each question had between 5 and 8 answer choices. So you really needed to know exactly what the answer was as almost all choices were covered. For example, the question: CGI, PHP and JavaScript are on what side respectively - had 6 choices.

1. server, server, client
2. client, client, client
3. server, server, server
4. client, server, client
5. server, client, client
6. client, client, server

So yes, you kind of had to know the exact answer to get the 3 marks. (Server, server, client - right?)

The Monday that went by had Data Structures. Although I didn’t have an easy time with the exam, I think I did quite alright in it. There wasn’t as much programming as I thought - more knowledge and rules based questions instead. But other than that, it went well

This Friday sees my Assembly Language exam take place. It’s the one I’m most worried about, probably because I can’t code Assembly Language that well. Plus the fact it’s on ASM, and both formats of MIPS… At least it’s not that harsh if I fail it since I’m almost guaranteed to be repeating Languages in the autumn…

I really should get back to studying but…