Posts Tagged ‘PSYCH 338’

Exams are done!

Monday, August 16th, 2010

…at least for the next 6 months or so. ;) Now that I’ve moved and let my brain cool down, I can finally start working on random projects (and replaying StarCraft II!).

At this point, exams are pretty much routine work. I still hate them though: for the most part, exams merely test a student’s memory retention and ability to work under time pressure (i.e. damn quick – I don’t remember not feeling the crunch on any non-trivial test). Bah. Anyway…

PSYCH 338 went well. The “final” was actually just a second non-cumulative midterm that happened before the actual exam period, giving me some extra leeway for my other courses. Of course, this meant that I had to study for it while working on other assignments (namely OS)… Overall, though, the course didn’t require too much mental effort. :P

BUS 352W was next. I’ve already mentioned earlier that I really enjoyed the course and having an awesome group for the projects definitely added to that experience. :) The final was longer than the midterm (though it wasn’t cumulative) and I didn’t think I’d actually finish (I did – although the last couple of pages looked like scribbles). But, well, I pretty much expected it since we were forewarned.

So that leaves my computer science courses. CS 341 was damned hard as expected. I think the structure of the exam actually hurt me more than it helped (a large portion of it was multiple-choice – a format I disagree with for mathematical exams). For the rest of it, I just can’t come up with decent algorithms without some references and a bit of time to mull things over. The material was still very interesting though. :D

CS 348 was next. I can’t say it was that hard although it was ridiculously long (20+ pages in 150 minutes, hah). What really ticked me off was how easy the 1996 winter final looked in comparison; I was able to answer most of the questions before I started my course review (though it didn’t cover much of the second half of the course), the exam was open book and more time was allocated. Huh?!

And CS 350 gets to be my last exam on Friday the 13th. :P It was actually surprisingly easy, but that was only because the midterm taught me the structure of the exam and the study questions (at the bottom of this page) more than prepared me for the more involved questions (e.g. calculating the maximum size of a file using Unix’s inode structure, tracing through scheduling/paging algorithms, etc.). The only question that really caught me off-guard was something on exponential average (I probably missed it since it was mentioned in only 3 lines throughout the entire course notes). Ah well… It was definitely a fun course even if the assignments were relatively long. Implementing interprocess communication in OS/161 would have been really interesting (that particular assignment wasn’t included in CS 350 though).

Unofficial marks are starting to come out today so we’ll see how stuff went. Next up: stuff about StarCraft II (probably). :P

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Midterms: PSYCH 338 and BUS 352W

Saturday, June 12th, 2010

It’s mid-June and things are starting to really pick up. Between interviews, assignments (lots of group projects for me this term), club meetings and other administrative stuff, I haven’t had too much time to do much else. Except for gaming. There’s always time for gaming. ;)

Anyway, I had my organizational behaviour midterm on Thursday followed by my marketing midterm on Friday. Needless to say I had a lot of reading to catch up on. :P I think between both of those courses I’ve went through around 400 pages of textbook reading. Speaking of textbooks… Ow.

Let’s start with PSYCH 338. One interesting concept about this particular course is that it’s divided into two parts: a standard lecture followed by discussion groups with TAs. This allows for more freedom to elaborate on weekly topics through various interesting activities (e.g. analyzing management styles in videos and teamwork exercises). It definitely helps considering my class size is well over 300. I thought all of the main concepts were articulated well; there was nothing that made me go “WTF is this?!”. :P

The midterm consisted of 55(+1) multiple-choice questions which I thought were relatively tricky. A large portion of them had options like “both A and B”, “all of X, Y, Z”, etc., while others contained negators and various keywords. Some were multi-part questions on a bunch of related terms. It definitely felt more like a 100+ question exam.

As for BUS 352W, I definitely enjoyed the lectures as there is a lot of discussion throughout (as opposed to most/all of my CS courses where everyone is just listening). A lot of the material resonated with me considering the stuff I read up on in my spare time (in addition to work experience). Good thing it’s summer though; I wouldn’t have liked walking to WLU and back in the snow. ;)

I probably wasn’t as prepared for the marketing midterm as I could have been since I was heavily distracted by a few side projects. The exam was basically a bunch of “short”-answer questions followed by some multiple-choice. It was a lot of writing, but I actually finished with time to spare. Three minutes, in fact. Awesome! (Note: I suck at writing tests and even moreso when they’re within tight time constraints.)

On the aforementioned distractions: I’ve been researching like mad on various topics like computer vision, AI, OCR and more. I wonder if there are courses at UW for some of those topics… I know that there is one for AI in CS; the others might be in various engineering disciplines. Currently my focus is on OpenCV (a programming library for real-time computer vision) and Tesseract (an OCR engine). I’ll probably write something about them later if I find anything interesting. :P

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