Exam Tips

I've got this new device for measuring time. It is called a pen. I can get around a third of the way through a new red ball point pen in a day at the moment. I can just about tell what time it is by the amount of ink left.

In case you haven't guessed, I'm marking at the moment. Around 100 second/third year papers and then I get to mark the 150 or so first year ones. Wonderful. But you do get some quite good exam tips which are worth passing on (sorry if these are a bit UK University-centric, but that is where I work) :

• answer your questions in order. If you can't do one part, leave a blank page and go back to it. Nothing annoys a marker more than having to flip through an answer book looking for bits of questions. And you really don't want to annoy the marker (although of course it makes no difference to your mark). and start each answer on a new page, after all, you aren't paying for the answer books...
• don't make things up. People answer fiction in the faint hope that the marker might go for it. Never worked when I tried it as a student, and doesn't work when I'm marking either.
• don't answer a different question. Showing off the bit you happened to revise (but didn't come up on the paper) is not going to impress anyone, least of all the person marking.
• work through the last three previous papers answering all of the questions and get them marked by someone. If you do this it is almost impossible to fail.
• rough your answer out first. Make some notes in pencil, or marked "rough" before you write out the proper answer. This helps you structure things.
• don't write in dirty great blocks of text. This makes it very hard to mark. If you split things up it looks a lot nicer. Don't be afraid to use bullet points or tables if these get the answer accross. And never underestimate the value of a good diagram.
• don't leave early. At Hull students can leave after the first 30 minutes of a 3 hour exam if they want to. But think how stupid you'd feel if you thought of something after you have left the room.....
• If there is something affecting your performance, make sure that your tutor knows about it. Anything which stops you giving 100% is something you should make people aware of.
• Oh, and being lucky helps as well!
  

Time Management

Been using my wonderful marking program today. Together with the snipping tool for the Tablet PC it makes quite a formidable device for grabbing bits of program displays and listings, annotating them and then dropping them into a customised web page for each student. I've had to put an embargo on "bright new ideas" (although I do write them down) because if I implemented them I'd never get any of the proper work done.

But when I use my programs I always find problems "round the edges". Sometimes the student files aren't quite right, or their programs get stuck, and then my program misbehaves and I've had to sort it out. I reckon that a programmer should spend around 20% of time solving the problem and then around 80% of the time handing all the ways that their solution could fail. Add on around 50% for testing and 20% for writing documentation and you get an understanding of why programmers are so busy. Or why some programs don't work as they should....

Systemantics

Many years ago I bought a book. This was not an isolated event, in fact I have bought many books since. And I've even read some. This book (purchased in 1975) is a wonderful read. I ran across it on my bookshelf today. 

I was therefore very pleased to find that you can still buy it. Systemantics is about systems. How they take over and get a life of their own. If you are in business you should read this book. If you want to be in business you should read this book. If you like a good laugh you should read this book. My favourite quotes (from many) :

People In Systems Do Not Do What The System Says They Are Doing

Things Are What They Are Reported To Be

Cupboard Love

Apparently cupboards should have backs. They are not supposed to act like those things that magician's assistants get into and subsequently disappear from. The cupboard in our kitchen is slowly changing back into sawdust, and as a kind of weigh point on this progress the back fell off, which resulted in tins of tuna (dolphin safe) amongst other things vanishing into it, never to be seen again.

Well, today I did something about it. Using my electric screwdriver, bradawl and of course my trusty hammer, I contrived to refit the shelves, brace them with some plastic bracing thingies and firmly fix the back in place. In the proces I found some quite, shall we say, elderly food. All nicely packed and sealed. We had three categories; not past sell by date, past sell by date and sell by date worn off.

Whatever did we do before sell by dates? Perhaps they are a great marketing scam to make people buy new products for no good reason. However, I've always had a sneaking respect for them. For many years (and even today in some plants) the sell by date on bottles of Budweiser was produced by software written by my own fair hand. Not that we ever had any in our house long enough to ever need to worry about that of course....

Lookout for Outlook

If you use Outlook for your email and contacts (and who doesn't) then I can heartily reccommend Lookout. It builds an index of your inboxes and contacts and then performs fast (and I mean *really* fast) searches of them. It uses similar search expressions as Google, so that you can esaily narrow your searches down and it seems to work like a dream. At the moment it is free, but when the time comes I'll be putting my 30 dollars into the pot....