Wednesday, 13 January 2016

Exams, Exams, Exams ...

This week is going to be all about exams. I just announced the start of the exams in the last post.
Weekly articles are long – much longer. You will need to invest some time to read this. After all it is 768 words.
Unlike all other English exam papers that I have written till now, I had actually read about the format of writing answers. This help me greatly with respect to time management. Where I used to write about half a page of an answer, I learnt that simply 4 to 5 lines, or rather, sentences, suffice.
Unlike all other English exam papers that I have written till now, I actually enjoyed writing the paper, which was a very big surprise even to me.

The biology paper, I knew, was going to be very tough. That is because I have spent the last two years studying physics, chemistry and mathematics. The biology that I had studied till then was in an 11th hour fashion. This time I studied it in a 9th hour fashion.
At the end of the paper, I knew that I had actually given my best in this paper. The few hours after the paper were blissful. It was one of the best feelings that I have ever experienced, one that could be considered as inner peace. Well, if that is true, then inner peace is really short lived.
I understood that at the end of the physics paper on the 8th of January. Now one might think that physics should not be a difficult subject after all, but believe me in the subjective format it is so.

The German Paper made me think a bit. The situation for German was similar to that of English. I did not know how to study. That is mainly because of two reasons: I have the least amount of study material for studying German, and I attended a crash course for German for about the first two weeks of December last year. My study of German during that time duration was more thorough than ever before. That, coupled with the fact that I hate revision, certainly was one of the reasons.
The German HSC paper is also highly objective in nature. That is why German is one of the most scoring subjects out there. My paper ended in just 92 or 93 minutes of the allotted 180 minutes, which again surprised me because I usually take more than 2 hours to complete the paper.

Another thing I discovered regarding my laptop, or rather, Lenovo IdeaPad, is the speech recognition feature, which is surprisingly accurate even for my Indian English accent. As one might have guessed, this post has not been typed, but dictated till this point.

The exam schedule had a 2-day gap in it. So, the next exam – Mathematics – was on Tuesday, the 12th.
The Mathematics paper was as usual, not difficult, but lengthy.
I also later realised due to a discussion of the paper with my friends that I forgot a factor of 2 in a question of integration when I substituted 2t=tan(m) for whatever reason.

I am posting this before the last of the exams – PT or (Physical Education (I know that the abbreviation is for physical training)) – which is a written examination.
We have been given a list of 100 MCQs and any 20 of them would be asked. We just have to write the correct options – simple, right?
One of the questions is: ‘Which of the following is not a famous cricketer?’
Some questions made my mother (who is a doctor) wonder whether this is a PT exam (written) or for some medical injury expert. Nevertheless, the wording of the questions is very funny.
Another question is: ‘A basketball player received repeated thigh contusions. They (Yes, ‘they’ instead of ‘s/he’) said they ran through the pain each time and were hit with opponent’s knees……’
If you don’t laugh on that, I predict that you have some sort of traumatic experience with basketball.

Over the weekend, I would have been bored, if it wasn’t for Stephen Hawking’s 1984 bestseller. It reignited my interest in relativity and caused me to read 2 complete articles on general relativity, and revise special relativity.
Till the 12th, here in India, the teachings of Einstein are related to the photoelectric effect and the Brownian motion, and rarely (very rarely) special relativity. It is for the photoelectric effect that he was awarded to Nobel Prize, after all.
Well, that’s all for this week and thank you for reading this far. Be sure to read the next article.

PS: Do visit just after the middle of the week. I am planning to post a special mid-week article.

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