- If, when using an acronym, any person has to stop and ask you what that acronym means, you lose. Any potential time you may have saved by using the acronym is gone.
- No conversation shall consist entirely of acronyms.
- Acronyms shall not be misspelled.
- Some acronyms were not meant to be pronounced as words. Don’t even try.
ex. “awmfugg”. - If you make up an acronym, nobody will know what it means.
- (Corollary of rules 5 and 1) Don’t make up acronyms.
Author Archive for Cory
Up until this year, I had always just signed up for whatever courses I needed or wanted without giving any thought to the distribution of the exams at the end of the semester. I had always just assumed that somebody must plan out the exam schedule so that no one ends up with something ridiculous like 5 exams in 3 days.
I was wrong.
So I sat there, a week before finals, staring in disbelief at my schedule. It was completely my fault, I suppose. I had known since a few weeks into the semester what my exam schedule was, but the reality of actually writing 5 exams in 3 days never sunk in.
It didn’t help that these particular exams turned out to be among the worst exams I’ve ever taken.
The 371 final was supposed to be a JC Liu special - full of easy marks and simple questions on only the main concepts. Instead, it required full knowledge and application of every tiny detail ever mentioned in JC’s slides. My exam schedule had forced me to focus on only the main parts of each course, which left me woefully unprepared for the academic assault that was JC’s exam.
My Psyc 100 exam the same day, on the other hand, was designed with the sole intention of causing nervous breakdowns. Consider the following question right from the test: “After returning from a war, Bob has been experiencing symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress disorder. He has been feeling …blah blah blah .. difficulty controlling his emotions when … blah blah blah … People say that he acts strangely sometime .. blah blah blah. (10 sentences or so later), What part of the brain controls the expression of emotion?
This, of course, immediately caused Multiple-Choice-Exam Stress Disorder in every student in the room. Why did we just read a paragraph on Bob’s sad life full of war, emotions, and post-traumatic stress when in the end, the question had nothing to do with Bob at all. It could have been a simple 5 second question and answer. What part of the brain controls the expression of emotion? Is it a. the pons, b. the hypothalamus, c. the cerebellum, or d, the brain stem? Easy. The answer is b, the hypothalamus. Did I need to know about Bob’s stupid life? Is it a. no, b. definitely not, c. not for this exam. or d. not ever? Now that’s a tough choice.
Hadley’s Cmpt 320 exam was more or less what I expected, but much, much shorter. On a final exam worth 45% of our final grade, there were fifteen questions with most being multiple choice. As for the content, it was straight out of Hadley’s overhead lecture notes. No surprise there. The path to a good grade in this course was straightforward and everyone in the class knew it. Take down every note Hadley writes in lecture, then regurgitate it on the exam. Still, I couldn’t help but feeling the pressure as 2% of my final grade in the course rested on each MC question covering topics like the names of random computer simulation researchers, the numbers from outdated studies, or the themes of some obscure novel. None of these were mentioned more than once in lecture through the entire course.
I won’t comment on my Numerical Analysis exam. I still don’t want to think about it.
Finally, my last exam - the one I was actually looking forward to, let me down as well. Through some combination of bad last-minute studying and poor cheat-sheet writing, I managed to be completely unprepared for the AI exam for 47% of the final grade. We were allowed two single-sided “cheat-sheets” to take to the exam. Most people (myself included) interpreted this to mean two hand-written sheets of paper, but some students printed off every word from every slide of the course notes in very small font onto two sheets of paper. The invigilators let them waltz right in, not with cheat sheets, but with the entire year’s notes printed off. This essentially turned the year’s mark distribution into 53% assignments/midterms, and 47% cheat-sheet making.
So that’s it: about 45% of my grades in each of my 5 courses determined in one dark, long week. What bothers me the most is that I know I could have done maybe 20-30% better on each final if I had had even one day to study between each.
I won’t make that mistake again. This term, I’m planning my courses and my exam schedule.
Stopping in the middle of the street to turn left ought to be illegal.
There is absolutely no reason why someone would need to do this. There are plenty of streets with marked “left turning” lanes specifically put there so that people don’t block traffic. Furthermore, if need be, people could just do 3 right turns rather than one left in the middle of the street.
I’m not advocating this in all situations. It’s perfectly fine to turn left if there are no cars coming in the other direction and you can get out of the way quickly, but stopping for 30 or 45 seconds to wait for a break in traffic is just wrong. It’s saying “Fuck everyone behind me. I’m turning left”.