Stage clear!

This exam period has to have been one of the most difficult ever - not necessarily because of the exams themselves, but because of my body's complete refusal to co-operate. I woke up at 3am this morning, and had to dash to the bathroom roughly once every half hour from then until 8, these periods interspersed with the nightmares that my argumentative brain decided to throw at me.

This is all very strange - normally I don't suffer from exam nerves, and far less have to spend mornings bringing up nothing before each one. As a result, I've sat them all while hungry and uncomfortable. It can only be that I had food poisoning on the first morning, then was sick about being sick on the other two. My head is fine but the rest of me disagrees, and wins by majority. It's as if it doesn't think that Mike Weir's remarkably sparse AI notes make things difficult enough.

Nevertheless, my exams are now over. I know that reading about other people's exams is almost as bad as having to sit them yourself, so for ease of comparison I have plotted the exam difficulty on the Rojometer, a scale that I invented for my Benchmarking presentation and that is dedicated to one of the more outspoken members of the class. No one outside computer science is going to get this. Still.

I'll condense this to mention just the major drawbacks. I'd say that today's exam, the AI one, was the one that I thought would be most difficult, but in reality I found myself being able to answer pretty much everything. It came to nine pages, as it happens. Frustratingly, each of the two massive formulae that I'd learned were given on the sheet and were only worth four marks anyway, so I avoided that question, but otherwise they were remarkably similar to some of the questions that we'd already covered in lectures.

The formula travesty, however, couldn't quite compete with a question in the Architecture paper: Give a description of hazards with regard to pipelines, and provide outlines of data, structural and control hazards. [1 mark]. Writing half a page of descriptions just to get one mark borders on absurdity.

But when it was all over, we went to Aikman's and talked about everything from psychology to ears and jet planes, then I wandered off to try and remember where I'd left the car, and drove home belting Glory of the World. I was stuck in a huge traffic jam for fifteen minutes, which spoiled the mood a bit, but the idea was there.

And now at fast approaching quarter to four, I think it's high time for some breakfast.