The most hated on

I hate studying for exams. One of my greatest strengths is my ability to assimilate a large amount of information in a very short time; I've developed this as a result of six years of hating studying for exams. (Edit: I should clarify that I'm not particularly proud of this skill. It lets me get away with being uncommonly lazy.)

Just because I can do it, though, doesn't mean I have to enjoy it. I'd much rather be doing problems, or even writing summaries, than just pouring information into myself. As a happy medium, my favourite method of exam preparation is working through old exams.

Two of my four exams this trimester are utterly without precedent. Metrics this year is being taught by a different person, and in quite a different way, from previous years. As a result, last year's exam is not a very good guide to this year's. All we have to go on is the structure of the midterm and the content of the problem sets. This is not too bad; it's not that difficult to generalise from one to the other.

Macro has undergone a serious change in structure this year. Although the content covered seems to be broadly similar, the exam format we've been told to expect is totally different from last year's exam. We have two sections of two questions each, and a choice only on section B. Last year had six questions with a simple choice of three. We have, apparently, "a mix of essays and problem solving". Last year's questions were all essay questions.

In addition to the decrease in choice - we get to leave out one, whereas last year's lot got to leave out three, lucky bastards - we're also suffering badly from a lack of precedent on content. In a course with problem sets, it's generally safe to assume that the exam will be at a similar level to the problem sets. This course has had only one problem set, and that related only to the second half of the course.

As we are given to expect "a mix of essays and problem solving" in both sections, we'll probably be faced with at least one analytical exam question based on the first half of the course (which we won't have an option to skip). Although we've been given analytical material in spades in the assigned reading, it's not clear at all whether we're expected to have learned this in much detail. Do we need to practice only techniques which were demonstrated in class, or do we need to understand all the hard-out math in the academic papers we've covered? Are we going to be asked to prove known results or derive unexpected ones? Will we be given the assumptions or asked to lay down our own? Will there be calculus?

Asking Dr Macro any of these questions draws a response along the lines of "all the course material is examinable". Yep. That's... so helpful.

Like damn, we just swapped

This weekend I did my last ever Micro assignment. I made it the best I possibly could, which coming from a perfectionist like me, means it's something of a tour de force (hopefully). It goes on and fricking on. Every base is covered, every possible interpretation, special case and side issue discussed. And at the end of it all, the entirety of all the conclusions are summed up like this:

My last ever assignment and I've finally learned how to draw pictures in $\LaTeX$! How cool is that?

Technically I shouldn't post that until after the assignment due date (Friday), but if any of my classmates do happen to read this (unlikely), they'll already know that it's meaningless without any derivation. And that took five pages.

The experiment which was in this paragraph failed epically and has been removed.

Bitches, they come, they go

There is this long to go until the end of university.

At that time I'll have posts remaining on exam results, Honours class, and any final reflections on my time at university - and that'll be it. I'll have to find something else to talk about.

That means this blog will become useless to me. There's not space in the masthead to change the title again, and anyway, I can't think of another word that fits into the rhythm. ("Employed Rhapsody"? No.) Then there's the label set, which is specifically university-related, and which will become unmanageably large if I start adding other types of labels to it. And the layout, and the colour, and the gimmick of titling all my posts with song lyrics - no, there's just too much to change. Better to make a clean break.

Also, because of my job, I won't be able to contribute much to discussions about economics from next year. You can see I'm going to have to find a way to change direction a bit.

For the next few months I'll dual-blog here and at litblog (there's a new widget in the sidebar to help my four readers keep up with litblog from here), and then I'll close this and take all my blogging over there. This blog will remain online as a static archive as long as Google and I both see fit.

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.

Monday through Sunday, yo

And then it was February. Work is still awesome, and I have twenty days of it remaining. I got my weekends sorted - Saturdays are for washing, Sundays are for cooking. Except when one of my lovely colleagues (or friends) suggests going out on a Saturday, in which case Sundays are for busy. Sunday nights, then, are for sore heels, resulting from long periods standing on hard floors in bare feet. Should I put sneakers on to do the dishes? It might save me from serious issues with the bones of my feet later in life.

Recently I discovered Metallica, in a small way. They kept playing Enter Sandman on the radio, and I kept going "ooh, what's that?". Eventually I went out and bought S&M. It's fairly awesome stuff. And so is this.

My name is what?

There are many reasons to complain of Excel 2007, but it seems to be trying to make up for itself here.

Let's do the math

On Friday I picked up my sixth and last journal, which got an A. My average journal grade (weighted by the number of articles in each journal) is therefore between 79% and 90%, or between 7.8 and 8.4 grade points - crudely, it's an A. After throwing in my first essay I'm averaging 76% to 82%, or 7.3 grade points, an A- for the whole course.

Far be it from me to guess how sociology lecturers really average across letter grades (especially given that they may have recorded actual percentage marks that we know nothing about), but basically, if I get an A in the last essay then I'll probably get an A for the course. If I get an A+ for the last essay then I'll definitely get an A for the course. It's pretty unlikely at this juncture that I'll get an A+ for the whole course - I don't think they scale internally assessed work that much.