That's funny, it looks as if I never got around to posting this when I wrote it in early November...

After my midyear exams I summarised, for each course, the expected number of students answering each possible set of exam questions, given by the quotient of the number of students and the number of possible exams in that course.

Here's the corresponding summary for my finals. This time I'm including detail about the question choices, because it helps make more sense of the value of $E(x)$.

Course	Students	Choice of	From	E(x)
Macro	14	1	2	7
Modelling	7	3	6	0.35
Micro	8	2, 1 and 1	4, 2 and 2	0.8
Metrics	7	3	4	1.75

Vitriolic, patriotic stand, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched

The Metrics exam was good. Prof Metrics had obviously learned from our variously abysmal performance on the midterm, and he gave us a nice present for our last exam - math problems instead of essays! I had fun, except for where I forgot everything I knew about Dickey-Fuller tests, but that bit was only worth around 10%.

Well, wouldya look at that:

What do I do now? Where am I supposed to be? Who am I? Suddenly no one is expecting anything of me. How shall I react to this?

There's still time to change the road you're on

Today was the last day I will ever have to spend studying for Honours. The last day of pacing the house alone, trying to force myself to work. The last day of reading and writing, reading and writing, until my brain feels like a revolving door for information.

The econometrics exam is in 12 hours. The fact that I have to sit an exam is dwarfed in my mind by the fact that it's my last exam. When I consider it, I'm fairly unconcerned - mostly because this particular exam is without precedent, so I have no idea what to be specifically worried about.

In his armchair, you can feel his disease

Another good exam in Micro. It wasn't as great as Modelling, but it was perfectly fine. I ran out of time to do all of the low-marks part for which I hadn't prepared so well, but I'm very confident in my work on the high-marks parts.

After the exam we all stood around and sort of looked at each other. It was as if none of us wanted to admit the course is over (for most of the class, this also means the year is over). I guess I'm not alone in loving Micro.

I asked the exam supervisor why they're still having to take away our question papers after the exam. Apparently the official reason is still swine flu. I don't understand. If the question papers get germs on from a coughing class member, won't our pens and things then have germs as well? How does confiscating only the papers prevent the spread of disease? And what happens to the papers now? Unless they're destroyed immediately, they'll still be effective transmission vectors regardless of whether students take them home or not.

Now Metrics, Friday, and that's it!

Flicker from the opposite loft

The Micro exam is in 12 hours. As usual with Micro, I'm incredibly relaxed. Notice how I haven't made any wanting posts about Micro; that's because I never had that sensation of just not wanting to read about it.

And in 14 hours, Micro will be over forever and ever. OMG... I'm going to miss Micro.

Pink, brown, yellow, orange, and blue

Back on form. Yeee-ah.

The Modelling exam was great; of the six questions (choice of three), there were five I could have done pretty well. I chose the three questions which related to the two Reserve Bank models we studied. All went well, I wrote lots and didn't run out of time in any dramatic way. Naturally I was mid-sentence, nay, mid-word when the examiners called time; you don't stop writing with time to spare just because you've finished the core of what you wanted to say. Hopefully Prof Modelling will be able to decipher what I meant by "a combination of fan charts and traditional multiple proj".

As for those 65 INFO 102 students, by the end of the exam only three were left in the room. Must have been an easy exam for them. Yeah... I remember first year.

The Furies breathing down your neck

Exam in 12 hours. Strangely hopeful. You know the deal. Except this time, I feel as if there may be some justification for being hopeful; I've spent the day cuddled up with the KITT paper (yes, it's big enough to cuddle) and have actually been enjoying it. Bizarre, I know. But probably a good omen for the Modelling exam.

Business continues below

The marks for the last Micro assignment were finally posted on Sunday (Dr A Micro had an accident which delayed his marking a bit). I got 92%, which is fine with me. Someone got 96%. That's fine too.

The next exam is Modelling, on Saturday. The seven of us are in with 65 INFO 102 students. The other 117 of them are split across three other exam rooms (yeah, I remember undergrad). We'll probably have to sit in the front two rows of our room so the examiners can distinguish us from the first years; I don't mind so much, as long as the little tykes are quiet.

I will let you down

The Macro exam was almost exactly the exam I had prepared for, with no questions on unexpected topics, but a time management fail led to me doing only about two-thirds of the paper. I kept thinking I'd shortly unstick the bit I was stuck on, and then suddenly there was no more time. Fail. I probably will not get that A-.

Sometimes you gotta suffer a little in your youth

Dr A Micro: "Let me tell you about the exam. You'll have to choose two essay questions and two numerical questions."

Class: "Will they all be worth the same?"

Dr A Micro: "No, the numerical questions are worth 35 marks each, but the essays are 15 marks each. So I would do the numerical questions first."

Class: "How long will the essays be?"

Dr A Micro: "About a page each. Basically just regurgitate the lecture notes."

Class: "… and the papers?"

Dr A Micro: "No. I only expect you to have read my lecture notes. Mentioning the papers might get you bonus points, but… no."

OMG

I LOVE MICRO

Ain't no use jiving, ain't no use jokin'

I got 77.67% 76.67% in the Metrics midterm. Sigh.

It's still an A-, so if I do better in the final exam, I will still get an A. But I am definitely not getting any prizes at the end of the year. Classmates, please stop asking me if I'm going to get any prizes, cos I'm not.

Observation: the midterm was on September 11. The final is on Friday 13 November. Logic dictates that the unluckiness of these two dates should cancel out, but I'm not so sure now.

Digging my way to something better

When I first started this countdown, it had over a year to run. At that stage it was counting down to the last possible ending time of the last possible exam in the 2009 end-of-year exam period, calculated from the university's official calendar.

That's how it looked just before 2pm today. At 2pm the final exam timetable came out, and I was able to correct it for the actual date and time of my very last exam. As a result of the correction the countdown lost 30 hours.

It's a very spread-out exam timetable by Honours standards. I have two weeks between the end of the trimester and my first exam, then another whole week, then a bunch at once. This is probably the worst possible timetable for my study style - I'm not much good at multitasking in the absence of an urgent deadline.

Having said that, it's good to have time at the start, and it's good that they're all in the morning.

Now deservingly this easy chair

The Metrics midterm was fine. I felt weak afterwards, but not from horror, just exhaustion. Prof Metrics took the unusual step of asking us how we found it while he was still collecting in the papers. We all gazed limply at him for a while until someone ventured that we could probably have used more time.

My sketchy intuitive understanding of the material will be the single factor that costs me the most marks. I can prove stuff from morning till night, but not in only two hours. This made it difficult to satisfactorily explain some of my conclusions without including a full proof.

Tired and underprepared

It's common for university exams nowadays to offer a lot of choice about which questions to answer. I'm not sure what the aim of this is - I can't construe it in any other way than throwing a lifeline to the underprepared student - but as I have on more than one occasion been one of those underprepared students, I'm not complaining.

It does, however, introduce an interesting statistic which I like to think summarises the size of the class relative to the complexity of the course: the number of students who answered each possible set of exam questions. Let this be called x_i, where i denotes the particular set of exam questions chosen. For example, in a standard first-year accounting course of 300 students, you might offer them a choice of any four questions from a set of five. There are five possible exams the students could choose (i=1, 2, 3, 4, 5), and if they choose questions randomly, you'd expect ³⁰⁰/₅=60 to sit each exam; that is, E(x)=60. This means you could assign one marker to each of the five possible exams, each would mark 60 scripts, and it would all be over relatively quickly. (I know they don't really mark exams that way, but that's not the point.)

50 or 60 is a reasonable value for E(x) for lower-level courses. In an upper-level undergrad course, with maybe 20 students and the same five possible exams, E(x) gets a lot lower; it's likely to be less than 10. Given that the real marking situation will probably a different lecturer marking each question, we now have such a small sample that it's possible some questions will have been chosen a lot more often than others. That means the marking load is a lot less spread, and, probably, marking becomes a more specialised task - as you'd expect for an advanced course.

But what happens at Honours level? Then things start getting seriously crazy. Here are the values of E(x) for each of the exams I just sat.

Course	Students	Choice of	From	E(x)
Growth	11	2	9	0.31
Macro	14	3	4, one of which has a subchoice	2
Micro	5	2 and 2	3 and 3	0.56
Metrics	10	4	4	10

The figure for Metrics is high because there was no choice in that exam. In all the others, the figure is so low, there's a real chance that some questions weren't answered by anyone at all - in two of the exams, there were more possible exams than students. Is that a win or a lose for the lecturer? Students with a great deal of specialised knowledge are probably a good thing, but what about the effort that went into composing the unanswered questions?

I took a different path

Finished the take-home programming question for Metrics. If I hadn't fluffed around so much this morning, it would have taken less than 24 hours. As it is, it's early, and I enjoyed it.

The solid line here is my first attempt at writing a nonparametric estimator to the data points. I think you'll agree it's a very bad fit.

This fit is better - in fact, perfect, which shouldn't have happened. I somehow managed to cancel out the randomness and estimated the dependent variable data using only the dependent variable data.

This is more like it! Not too jagged, but nonetheless a good fit. This was the signal that the first half of the question was done.

It's difficult to demonstrate pictorially what the other half was about, because it involved finding an optimal value for a parameter used in the first half - except the plug-in parameter value we'd been given turned out to be exactly the optimal one, so the picture didn't change. The best I can do is point out that my results were precisely what Dr Metrics told us to expect:

Holiday time now. Oh dear... it's a while since I had one of those...

I started out on Burgundy

Classwide reaction to the Metrics exam: "where's the rest?"

An easy question to answer. The rest is in the take-home programming question, which some have already done, and which I shall now start safe in the knowledge that my exam grade should be quite acceptable even if I do the programming all wrong.

The four questions in the exam were all either lifted straight from assignments, or very similar to assignment questions with minor modifications. It was not hard, and a person who knew what they were doing could have done it in an hour (half the exam time). Two people left around the 90-minute mark. I might have been with them if I hadn't drawn a mental blank on the first question; as it was, I stayed for the extra half hour (spending an hour in total on one quarter of the exam), and it was a good thing I did because I quite suddenly remembered the thing I'd forgotten. There was even still time to make use of it and complete the question comfortably.

No more exams! And no more Kelburn until October. Oh well.

Celebratory drink for the end of winter exams

Find your favourite enormous coffee mug. Estimate the volume. One part is one-eighth of this volume.

Put in the mug, in order:

1. One part gin
2. One part blackcurrant cordial
3. Two parts Charlie's old fashioned lemonade (or any homemade lemonade)
4. Four parts boiling water

Don't stir it, just drink it as soon as it's cool enough.

Nothing you can do that can't be done

In the Metrics exam I only need to get 70%, on a strict numbers basis, to get an A+ for the course. The formal exam on Monday will contribute 80% of my exam grade, with the rest coming from the "take-home question" due Thursday. This means I need to get 62.5% in the formal part of the exam and full marks for the take-home question (which is possible; it's a programming question, and Dr Metrics is a sympathetic marker of code). Things are looking up.

The most amazing thing: all my plastic L-files are empty of paper!

My "temporary filing" shelves aren't quite empty yet, but they're getting there!

The only bad thing about life at the moment is that our central heating system has failed. Today it reached 10°C on the back doorstep, 14°C in the hallway and 21°C in my room, where I spent the day with the door closed, curtains drawn and oil heater running. This made me quite popular with certain members of the household.

I beg to dream and differ

The Micro exam was this morning.

OMG. I love Micro.

The exam was like a long blissed-out trance. It was slow, being my only three-hour exam, and having been inexplicably cut to four questions from the anticipated five. And it was fun, being full of interesting problems to solve.

There was one part I couldn't do. Unlike in my other exams so far, I couldn't do it because it was hard, not because I hadn't prepared for it. It was one-third of the last question, making it one-twelfth of the exam. On a strict numbers basis I only needed 80% in the exam to get an A+. I might just be home on this one.

In the two days since my previous exam, the university has come all heavy on swine flu. They're preventing sick people from sitting exams with the rest of their class, and the exam supervisors have been given antiseptic wipes to add to the vast pile of stuff they have to take to every exam. (Our supervisor seemed slightly bemused by this, and I don't blame her. What are we going to do, infect our exam papers?)

A more worrying development is that the supervisors have also apparently been instructed to take in all the question sheets at the end of every exam. This is something to do with swine flu suspects sitting the exams at potentially later times; apparently the class can't be trusted not to show such people their question sheets. (Wouldn't most students avoid a suspected swine flu case for the sake of their studies? Just a thought.) This raises two issues. Firstly, there are people sitting exams under special circumstances every single exam period, and this has never before warranted the seizure of question sheets from the rest of the class. Secondly, when the entire class is in the same exam room at the same time, as with my exam today, the supervisor should be given the all-clear to let them keep their question sheets.

I've kept every single one of my exam question sheets since the start of university. Now the collection is incomplete. Oh, sure, I can download the 2009 exam when it appears online at the end of the year, print it out and file it with the others - but it won't be the original, and I'll know it. Thank heaven I hadn't written any notes on it that I would now have lost for ever.

Tonight an old friend phoned to whom I hadn't spoken for ages. This filled me with joy and hope, which I shall endeavour take with me into the preparation for my last exam - Metrics, on Monday. The real world is still out there, and it still gets in touch now and then.

It's cold when you're lonely

Some things never change.

The Overbridge is dark, cold and lonely, the adjacent cafe doesn't have the same name it did the last time I was here, and the one formula I didn't look up turned out to be in the exam. So much for Macro.

Lonely, lonely, lonely time

Coming to Kelburn for my first exam this morning made me feel homesick. It's a long time since I was here.

Remember THESE?

I had one in celebration after the Growth exam was over. The exam wasn't as bad as I thought - there were two questions I could do, so I did them. (We got to choose two of nine, so the odds were in our favour.) One was closely related to one of the essays I handed in yesterday. The other involved some mathematical unpacking of the Solow growth model. Both went pretty well, although my hand was really sore afterwards.

Then I sat down on a sofa and did the Metrics assignment, which I've just finished. So the worst is over, I think.