Augh! My exam just crashed!

Take-home exams and me do not get along.

Quizzes, More Quizzes, and the Glowing Sidewalks

I had a bunch of rather stressful quizzes (aka midterms, except that they aren't necessarily in the middle of the term) in the past couple few days. On the plus side, I also had a couple midterms returned that I did reasonably well on. It was particularly interesting to finally see how marking works in non-engineering faculties (disclaimer: note that one midterm can't fairly be used to extrapolate to all courses taught by all non-engineering faculties, but I'm going to do so anyway). For one thing, the marks were quite high: an average of 78%? A top mark of 100%? Only one failure? Preposterous! But aside from that, it was weird to see comments like "good, but too short" instead of "good: 10 marks" or "wrong: zero out of ten". Oh subjective marking, how I've missed you.

Disclaimer 2: engineering does actually have subjective marking. It's currently mostly relegated to a certain online professional development course; still, even mathematical courses usually have some degree of subjectivity. Incidentally, that certain online professional development course has recently been the subject of an independent review (PDF) which is an informative read for anyone interested in such matters.

On a completely unrelated topic: there's a tutorial on Instructables about building a pressure sensitive glowing sidewalk as seen in Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" music video (obligatory link to the official YouTube copy of the aforementioned video). Fun times.

Procrastination Tale

I had an assignment due at 11:45 tonight. Checking my watch, I was disturbed to see it read 9:26. Then I realized I was looking at it upside down. I had a good laugh and turned it around.

Then I realized I'm an idiot.

So it's 3 am right now...

Sleep deprivation. It's an important topic. Just go to the Wikipedia page on the topic and you'll find some supposed effects of it that are frightening enough to keep you awake for a while.

Yet sleep deprivation is basically a fact of life for university students. For some, it's a point of honor to stay up late (this usually goes with the mantra "sleep is for the weak"). Others are pressured into staying up to finish assignments, cram for tests, or play World of Warcraft. But the fact remains, you cannot function well when tired. In fact, I don't think I can finish this blog post right now. Seriously, I can't do it... come back in ten hours and this post will be jaw-droppingly good. I'm going to bed.

<------- Nine and a Half Hours Pass ------->

Okay, so what did we just learn here? Other than I've lost the ability to stay up late in my old age?

Things become harder when you're tired. Assignments that should take two hours under normal conditions can suddenly take fourteen hours to complete (I have fairly reliable sources that indicate that this has really happened, but not to me personally... my record is about eight hours).

Can sleep deprivation ever help get things done? I think that most students have experienced a late-night essay writing binge at one point that felt remarkably productive. This is usually attributed to last-minute pressure providing motivation to work. You'll note though, that you only get that feeling with projects that have subjective marking schemes: math assignments never get easier with "last minute pressure."

I'm going to throw a wild conjecture out there: when you're able to write an essay quickly at three in the morning, it's not because of last minute pressure. No, it's simply a case of your standards dropping to the point where you become more focused on finishing the essay that doing it well.

"But," you say, "I got really good marks on all the essays I wrote at 4 a.m. the day before they were due!"

I don't doubt that this is possible, because I've also done remarkably well with essays written in the witching hour. There are times when you need to stop overthinking everything and just start writing, and if too much thinking is the problem, sleep deprivation can certainly cure that.

Head Hurts

(click image to see full-size)

For all those wondering how I managed to concuss myself while getting out of bed...

[In case you can't tell from the drawings, I was trying to wake up, but kept giving up and falling on my pillow. Then I got close to getting up and managed to hoist my body off the bed -- which just means I missed my pillow when I gave up.]

I'm fine now, by the way. And I probably didn't really get a concussion. No really, Mom, I'm fine.

A Day in the Life

This post is a bit belated, but I was going too crazy on the day it actually happened to write about it then. The day in question was the 20th of April; the day of my last exam.

I woke up that morning to find a probability exam written into my schedule. It had been scheduled in the night before in the large, desperate, pen-scratch font that is customary for scheduling morning exams. "Heed me," the font screamed from the sticky note on the wall, "or suffer the consequences as you sleep through your exam and fail miserably out of life."

And heed the note I did, as I sprinted out of the house and onto the bus towards campus. True, I came closer to missing the bus than I should have due to a poorly laced boot that threatened to fall off in the final sprint, but I caught the bus nonetheless and all was good. Yes, all was good, for not only had I caught the bus, but I had studied well for that exam and felt prepared to do battle with it. I felt, as I rode onto campus, like a probabilistic cruise missile, ready (nineteen times out of twenty) to deliver a deadly payload of ninety-nine point nine percent accuracy onto the questions that defied me.

That was until I realized I had left my wallet on the bus.

You see, earlier, upon boarding the bus, I put my wallet on the ground to tie the laces of my boot which, as you will recall, had come undone in the sprint to the bus. This literal undoing of shoe laces threatened to initiate a larger, more catastrophically metaphorical undoing of my mind right before the exam as I freaked out about my wallet. But I digress.

I should clarify that at the time of this incident, my wallet also contained almost every piece of ID that I own, plus the student card required to write my probability exam.

Fortunately, it turns out that people don't really care about that whole "show the student card" rule during exams. I subsequently aced that exam more thoroughly than I had any right to expect.

So the exam was over and things were going swimmingly, but I still didn't have my wallet or, by extension, any way to get into my house (yes, my wallet also had my keys in it). At this point, I called up my sister, a seasoned pro in losing stuff on buses, and a short while later we found that my wallet was being held by the local transit authorities.

Success! Exaltation! Oh, happy, happy day! I didn't even care that I had yet to retrieve my wallet from the bus terminal across town; it was found and everything would be okay. I was feeling so good about this turn of events, that I decided to just trek out and pick up my wallet. Of course, I knew it was a long walk and that it was raining, and that I probably could have just borrowed some change from someone to pay the bus fare before I got my wallet back, but that didn't matter to me just then.

It started to matter to me a lot more over the course of the next hour. Eventually, I was wet enough and lost enough to use the old 'phone a friend' tactic.

"Help," I pleaded, "I am cold and wet and have no idea where I am."
"Bahahahahaha" he replied, but, fundamentally non-evil person that he is, he then googled my location and joyfully informed me that I had been walking in the wrong direction for an hour.

*Sigh.

Well that was pretty much the interesting part of the day. After that, I walked back, met up with the guy I had called, borrowed a bus fare from him, retrieved my wallet, and then went to a restaurant and had a grand old time celebrating the end of the term.

The End.

No Sequel. Ever.

12.5

12.5 hours remain until my first exam. Hence the twitter-sized post.

Rough

I drew the above figure of a little student being crushed by a pile of work to reflect my current mental state. On the plus side, at least arches are generally fairly strong structural elements; unfortunately, the construction of this particular arch appears rather flawed so our student may well be smushed shortly.

There's nothing quite like midterms. They induce about 20 to 40 percent the stress and sleep deprivation as final exams (figures based solely on grade weightings), while also being right in the middle of classes. It's easy to get into a situation where you feel like studying one subject will cause you to fall behind in all the others; you'll note that the student in the drawing doesn't actually have an open book in front of him, but removing a book will cause the whole setup to collapse.

However, midterms come and go... and with enough sleep they even usually go well enough that understanding and grades can be salvaged by the end of the course. There's also life after midterms: an hour after my last midterm this Friday I'll be headed off on an engineering jazz band trip. Wee! So on that note, I'm off to bed.