Topic: Things that suck on tests

[gpw11]

I was writing a big ass final yesterday morning and I just couldn't get this one question right even though I knew how to do it and never had this problem before.  Basically, you're given some information regarding loans and have to find the best scenario. It's pretty simple finance stuff, so something like;

"Balance on current loan: $56,475
Periods remaining: 66
Periodic Rate: 0.6%

Find all related information including APR, APY, and payment.  Suppose you were offered a new loan to close this one out.  Your new loan has a closeout price of XXXX and a APR of XX%, and lasts a term of 72 months.  If you were only concerned with the rate would this loan be worthwhile? What would the cost difference of the loan be?  If cash flow was a concern, what rate would you need to negotiate to make the transfer worthwhile?"

It's kind of a shitty and convoluted question, but if you were just looking at how to do this in excel 12 hours earlier, it'd be pretty easy because you really only need to know three pieces of information about any loan to find everything out about it. The transferring is the hard part.

So, I'm in the exam doing this and it was the first question after the accounting part of the test.  I fucking hate accounting and gave up on studying it a long time ago when my dad sat me down and said "Son, you can do anything you want...just don't become an accountant." He's a CA and it's a horrible job (he broke out of that shit young and started a slightly accounting related consulting business).  I can see why it sucks....it's for fucking robots. So, I basically guessed my way through that part, and hit the finance part.  First question..."oh, EASY."  Start doing it in excel.....number fucking errors all over the place. What the fuck?

This question is worth like 2 points on a 100 something point test.  I don't know why, because it's actually more work than a lot of them, but I think that's how he scaled it to avoid people failing. I get caught up for literally 20 min trying to figure it out and never did.  I wrote a note on my excel sheet basically saying "WTF?", wrote a note on the test telling him to look at that, figuring I'd get at least one mark for having all the formulas in correctly.

So I'm sitting here today and open up excel while studying for something else and decide to fuck around with the question just to see what was up.  Ohhhhhhhh.....DOLLAR SIGNS. Apparently this is the only function in excel where they actually matter (I think) and I never use them for draft calculations.

That would have easily fucked with me if a third of the test wasn't simple first year economics that I burned through in about 3 min.

If I failed by one or two marks, I'll have a fucking conniption though.  The funny part is I just passed the midterm and the professor basically told me it was because I was doing everything by hand and there just was too much possibility for error when you don't have time to double check shit that way.  MY GODDAMN PENCIL STILL WORKS WITHOUT DOLLAR SIGNS MOTHERFUCKER.



Oh, and a persian girl basically stared crying halfway through the test...which was kind of awesome, but kinda sad.

[Schlotzky5]

I love epic breakdowns during tests. I've seen a lot of people hand in 2 hour tests in the first 15 min. Everybody knows they fail, so might as well sit there for another half hour and not look like an idiot. I've seen a couple people bring up withdraw forms with their tests and ask the prof to sign it in front of everyone. Its kinda like seeing someone cry, its a little disheartening, and a little funny at the same time.

For math intensive tests, if the teacher said calculators were optional I would purposely not bring one. It really helped me out believe it or not. I would do all the problems to the point where heavy math was involved, then I would write 'no calculator' and move on. If I had time at the end I would go back and do it by hand but teachers wouldnt take off if I ended getting the final answer wrong. There were a couple instances where I did the problem wrong, but I didnt have a final answer, and the equations looked close so I got full credit.

[iPPi]

What I hate about exams are questions that a HUGE.  Now, I graduated from Engineering a couple of years ago but the exams are still quite fresh in my mind.  I recall on one exam where one question was worth 45% of the marks on the entire exam.  It was absolutely gargantuan.  I think I ended up getting most of it right, but when a final exam is only 4 questions, and one of them is worth nearly half the exam it's a little stressful.

On one of my fourth year courses (neural networks and fuzzy logic), the professor was asking for opinions on how to make his final exam.  He said his old exams were primarily just an application of knowledge.  Well some asshole gave him the idea to add more theory related questions.  The exam was 7 questions -- the first question, we were asked to prove this theorem.  I swear -- when we started the exam, it was dead silent for about 30 seconds, and then the class collectively flipped the page to the next question.  I'm pretty sure no one got it because that's straight memorization and not an application of knowledge. 

[Cools!]

I hated exams were you weren't allowed to use a calculator and you wouldn't get partial marks if you accidently fucked up on simple math even if your logic was correct on how to get to the answer. When I was at University, you'd get ZERO marks for something like that because most TAs only looked for the final answer, not how you got to it.

I was a great student in high school cause I actually LIKED some of my subjects and would read up on advanced topics on my own. But when I got to University I quickly realized that it was the same thing again and the best strategy was to just cram and rehash the information. Nobody really cared that you "understood" what was going. All University did for me was drain whatever interest I had in the subjects and I stopped bothering.

Probably the best thing I did for my career was LEAVE and learn on my own.

[scottws]

I actually liked when exams didn't give you credit if you messed up something stupid and got the wrong answer.  It's math.  It's right or it is wrong.  There isn't a fuzzy gray area where you are sort of right.  Messed up a negative sign and it ruined your whole problem?  Well, that's the wrong answer and that's your fault for not working carefully.  Yeah, some exams have a tight time window but it can still be done pretty easily in all cases I've been in.

Tests don't really bug me.  Something happened at some point in my life where I decided I didn't really care.  This is sort of like the interview thing I mentioned in the supervisor interview thread.  I'm like Peter Gibbons in Office Space, I just don't care.  I once walked into a network security class, promptly realized there was an exam when everyone had their face buried in their notebook, briefly thought "shit..." and then took the test stress-free.  I think I'll always remember that one.  I turned to the guy next to me and said "Is there a test today?"  He said, "Are you serious?  You didn't study?"  I lied.  I remember when the professor was handing the test back he said something to the effect of "I know some of you haven't had me before and probably didn't realize my tests were all written answer and you aren't going to be happy with your scores.  All I can say is at least you know how I test now so you can be better prepared next time".  I figured he was basically talking to me.  I'm the first in the row and he's handing the tests back for people behind me.  64.  72.  82.  57.  77.  Then I get mine.  109.  I just retain information well so long as I pay attention and take notes.  I don't actually have to study the notes unless its something that requires a crazy amount of memorization like history.

But I've been in those situations where I knew as soon as I sat down I would fail.  At that point really what are you going to do?  Crying or being angry isn't going to help anything.  You are going to fail.  That's just the way it is and there is no sense getting all stressed about it.  Same way when you know the information.  If you know it, why would you be stressed about it?

I agree though with Cools that school in general, at least the Western version of it, isn't great.  I was the top student in pre-calc/calc in high school (at a top academic high school in the city), yet I couldn't for a minute even begin to try to solve a differential or limit today.  Heck there probably other calc type problems I had that I can't even remember the names of.  Even in my field of study - IT - I don't retain the information very well.  I took two classes that basically focused a significant part of the time learning about the IP address scheme and subnetting.  It's not like calc; I remember some of it.  But I constantly have to look up what the address range is for a network that is say 172.16.3.0/255.255.240.0.  I can't remember how to do the "math" to figure that out.