Well, it looks like the graph I made last Wednesday has been pretty accurate so far. I’m not sure if that’s something I should be happy about though. 
First off was CS 245. Yeah… I’m not going to lie: the final for this course was made of pure suck. It might not have been so bad given a very strong grasp of the concepts, but that wasn’t going to happen. I’ve already mentioned how woefully inadequate the given resources were; throughout the term I was drawing knowledge from various sites, textbooks and similar course offerings at other universities (go Wikipedia!). Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mind having to do extra studying. But when I learn more on my own time than in class (say approximately 75%), why am I paying for tuition? Meh.
Despite my rant, I still did relatively well throughout the rest of the course so I should pass comfortably. *Knocks on wood.* The main thing I’m worried about is how adversely it will affect my performance in the future (for example, when I take databases next term). It hasn’t been too bad thus far, but eh…
CS 240 is on the other extreme. Typically people don’t complain when a course is too easy, but I think there’s a limit. Throughout the term, the class has been relatively quiet and disengaged (in contrast with CS 246 where questions were being thrown around left, right and center). I’ve even heard some comments along the lines of whether this course actually prepares us for CS 341. Guess we’ll know soon enough.
I just wrote CS 240′s final a few hours ago and I’d say it was a pretty fair exam. Approximately half the questions were derived from assignments (so they were kind of trivial in nature as long as a few key facts were memorized), but the other half actually required quite a bit of thought (for example, adapting generic algorithms to solve a given problem). Surprisingly there weren’t any short-answer questions, despite the fact that we covered complexity classes and such.
I kind of wish we were given more time though; I didn’t actually get to finish despite rushing through quite a bit of it. Time has been my adversary on pretty much every exam I’ve taken; very rarely do I get the chance to do things like proofreading and whatnot. I don’t like that – time limits test dexterity, not knowledge. My brain just isn’t wired for short, intense sessions.
Actually, I can go one step further: I have a bone to pick with the notion of writing exams as a whole. I’ll rant about it in another post though, since I would have to delve into different learning styles and whatnot (plus I’ve deviated enough already)…
Anyway, CS 246 is up next! It should be “fun”.
In other news, Facebook changed some privacy features (and in the process ignited a lot of controversy), RockYou gets hacked (exposing some 32 million accounts with passwords stored in plain-text – I didn’t think any company could be so incredibly stupid in 2009) and Google implements personalized search (thus changing SEO completely). Oh, and it started snowing here with temperatures dipping below 0 degrees celsius. Yay. (In contrast, central Alberta dipped below -45 degrees last Sunday. )