detailed paper analysis part IThis year's exam is tough. very tough.
It started off with Project Management. Section A alone is do-able, but it was oredi more difficult than last year's. I didn't know that crashing can be done on an AOA network. Section B - MCQ was super tricky.. and we weren't even taught some of the questions. While waiting for my paper to be collected, I compared my optical answer sheet with the guy sitting 1 row in front of me in the LT. I estimated we have about 5-8 same shaded circles out of the 25 qns. Got home and discussed some questions, and we ended up convincing each other that each other's answer is the correct one. It's so ambiguous. Depending on how u look at the qns, there can be more than 1 correct ans!
Advanced Control was out of all my subjects, the one which I would say I'm the most prepared for, because it's my first technical subject and my next two 'Advanced' exams r in the next 2 days consecutively~ Preparation went well but it's onli the day before the exam itself that I realized i've missed out on a few more impt things which I neglected in my revision because I'm too lazy to study them. =P Some past yr paper discussion with Lester helped too... cos 1 similar qn came out! I finished 2 qns in ard an hour.. and ended up attempting all 3 remaining qns when i only had to do 2 more. Attempt is the word because I couldn't finish the paper in time. bleah. And there's one part to a qn which came out in the past yr paper b4... but I still couldn't do because somehow the solution to that part of the question is not in the solution sheet!
There was simply no time to do a proper revision after the afternoon paper. I was so sleepy and drained after AC and ended up not revising much for the morning paper on the following day. Advanced Stress turned out to be, i would say, not a difficult paper if one is hardworking enough to do the tutorials and has enough time to do last-min revision!! which is why some pple left half an hr b4 the time is up. But sadly i'm not one of them!! =( i scribbled till the last second even though I finished 2 qns in an hr plus. The last qn simply took up all the remaining time I had and I just couldn't find the constant D and E!!! aaargh.. and it doesn't look like a hard qn!! which makes it a vicious cycle becos even though I've tried very hard and still couldn't get the solution, I still think it shouldn't be too difficult and continue to attempt to solve the equations and wasted even more time~ finally after an hr of
exasperation, i gave up and moved on to the other parts of tat qn. And in a state of panic, i get confused by the unconventional coordinate system and more errors were made... bah!
I rarely had to end up in a state of panic towards the end of a paper but these two papers did it. I must say they are called 'Advanced' for a reason. It really didn't help that these two papers are on consecutive days, and to make things worse, AET had to follow so tightly!!!
AET is my most unprepared paper among all subjects (stats and FEA r not counted cos i haven't revised them at all) because I don't have any past yr papers to practise on, I don't have tutorial qns which are of exam format, I have a lousy txbk which has soo many words I don't know where the key points are, and I have a Mock exam paper which only serve to scare me becos I don't know how to answer them and i have NO SOLUTION to refer to. That's so helpful. And eventually, seems like the Mock paper is a good gauge to the actual paper cos i can't do any of both.. =( This is the first paper which, after I first looked at all the qns in the paper, I couldn't decide which one to start on first because none of them look do-able. Had to choose the lesser of all evils. There was this question which was so ambiguous i was wondering if there's any missing information and was actually waiting for one of the smarter pple out there to put up their hands to ask qn abt it. But nobody did so i had to accept that it's bcos i duno how to do. =( and there was tis qn which looked so ridiculous tat cw said that he could come up with more qns for the paper like this : 'The pilot pop his head out of the cockpit. Assume his head is back facing the direction of flight, find the increase in drag.' & 'A passenger went to the toilet to have a dump. Assume the shit gets released from a duct straight from the toilet bowl, find the probability that the shit will land on a plane flying at the same mach number at an altitude 5000 ft lower.' Not in these exact words but u get the idea. lol~
And with that, my exams unofficially ended because the next paper would be 6 days away and my aero housemates had spread the joy of post-exams to the entire house.