Christmas Exam Results

Before i’d sat any of my exams or even handed in all of my CA work to certain subjects, i blogged about how i felt ‘exams are business‘.

In that post i made predictions about what i’d get for each subject. Now i wasn’t expecting to get everything spot on, but i was expecting to be be accurate with my overall average mark. Here’s how wrong i was (in % terms) with my predictions.

• database management systems 0%
• broadband technologies +2%
• sys admin +4%
• web applications +11%
• project +17%
• training & support +17%

Overall difference from what i predicted +8.5%

I passed everything (as i expected). I predicted an overall average of 58% and my overall average was in fact almost 67%. So i was out by just under 9% which is quite a bit, but then again i made those predictions before i’d even sat the exams. Once i’d sat the exams i knew i had done slightly better than i’d estimated, but i would have added maybe 5% on to my prediction of 58%…

So overall, i’m happy. Underestimated my results in everything. They’re actually my best set of results since the first semester in first year…

• year one semester 1 70.8%
• year one semester 2 57%
• year two semester 3 61.5%
• year two semester 4 57%
• year three semester 5 66.8%
• year three semester 6 ?

As you can see from the chart above, traditionally i do worse in the latter half of the year and that’s almost ‘deliberate’. Whilst i never want to repeat any subjects, i make a real effort not to fail any subjects at christmas because it would hang over my head for 7/8 months until i’d get a second crack at it. By that stage, i’d have forgotten all the material too, so i’d effectively have to start teaching myself the course from scratch….

With summer exams, if i fail one, the material is still fresh in my mind and there is only about a two month gap to repeating it, plus you have no other subjects to focus on in the mean time, so if you’re going to fail exams, it’s always better to do it in the summer.

Anyway, i don’t think i’ll have any problems this summer… it sounds stupid but i do feel things are getting easier and not harder (as you’d expect)…

One possible reason for that is that we’re slowly starting to do more theory based work now… when i first started college, practical work was alien to me as i was coming from the leaving cert system where final written exams are the be all and end all. But my college course was very hands on…

Although practical work is more interesting, it can be incredibly frustrating and can have a knock on effect in exams (if one thing doesn’t work, you can’t complete other questions)… e.g. if you can’t connect to a network, you obviously can’t share or transfer files…

If that was a written question, i may not know how to connect to a network, but i might know how to share files so i could pick up some marks… so theory based work and written exams probably suit me best – blogging also gives me a huge advantage when it comes to written exams because i’m so used to putting things in my own words… i do it daily and have done for the past 3 and a half years so that can only give me and edge when it comes to answering questions.

If i understand something, i get the marks – no doubt about it… that’s why i can tell straight away when looking at a paper how i’ll do… If i know the answers, i’ll get close to full marks because i can explain myself.

Anyway, 30 modules down now, just 6 to go and i’ll finally have a degree and something to show for the past few years.