Neuro, Developmental, Stats

And the final reason why I haven't posted in the past few days has been EXAMS!! But now they're over and my next ones will be next semesters.

Every exam period I think to myself that I'll work harder during the term, that I will focus more and consolidate my notes and pretty much reach a point where I wouldn't need to study and could just walk in having all this knowledge. But at the end of the day I only ever do that with the courses I love and adore, mostly computing or mathematics based courses. The more fruity-stuff will probably always require a bit of study.

Then there's my most hated of third areas of study, neither mathematical nor fruity, just technical. That was my Neuroscience course. As I said, trying to learn 850 pages of a dense, jargon heavy textbook, something the lecturer couldn't even teach over a semester, is quite the impossible task.

Turns out, I really didn't need to study so intensively. The areas in which I had focused my learning over the semester anyway (language, vision, sound, cellular) were the only assessed areas. You'd think for the most technical subject there'd be far more technical questions, instead we had to write 5 'essays' and 11 short answer questions. None of my answers breached a page, a lot of people had 3-4 page essays, but I'm guessing their diagrams were large. I was quite concise and to the point, something that, if you're a reader of my blog, you'll know I'm usually not.

When that 3-hour mark came up, there was a literal collective sigh and there was literally some weight that was lifted and everyone could feel it. Neuroscience was over - the only neuroscience we have to study for a degree in psychology. The rest of it will be less intense <3

That was Monday morning. Tuesday afternoon brought about my Developmental psych exam. I always find the best assessment of study is really your own intuition. You know when you have the exam, and sooner or later, you will get into the mood to study. Sometimes that's two days before, sometimes that's 9pm the night before. I've never walked into an exam feeling I haven't covered enough.

This exam was something that I had consciously thought "I'm going to need to run home after Neuro and just study my ass off". Instead I went home, at lunch, lay down for a bit, watched a coupla hours of Prison Break season 2. I got to work sometime in the early evening and finished by 11pm. Watched a few more eps then went to bed. Woke up and consolidated what I had learnt and walked into the exam.

50 Multiple choice questions, 1 mark each, plus 3 short essay questions, altogether 50%. It's odd weighting, so I made sure to particularly give comprehensive and in-depth responses. Good thing with essays is that you can always spin shit, and written in the right way with some form of justification, and you'll be fine. Felt really good walking into that. Only thing I hate in these exams with my lecturer is that the multiple choice is 5 choices, and 3 of the choices will always be plausible. My problem is I end up with time leftover, sitting there going through them, and I end up trying to rationalise each of the three, until my judgement of which one is true is clouded to a point where I feel like I ought to change my answer.

Which, when all is status quo, is the wrong thing to do. My first, gut instinct is more often than not correct.

Between Tuesday and Friday morning I had to study for my stats exam. Turns out, and again my intuition was right, my study literally took 1 hour. All that was was going through a practice paper, and reviewing the answers, picking up lil' tricks with formulae. But as I mentioned, since I adored the subject and its inherent mathematics, I was pretty set.

And I was right (H). The exam was a total breeze. In terms of methodology I was totally right on ... but I'm glad I stayed the whole three hours and went over it.. there were a lot of number-crunching problems I made, but for the most part really fine. There was about 15% altogether than I nailed, that would have been the "advanced/complicated" stuff. Walking out of that exam most people were querying each other about "how did I figure out the y-intercept!?".

I came home and had an epic facepalm moment when I realised my method for getting the y-intercept could've been a lot neater using the point gradient formula, something I spent almost every mathematics tutoring session teaching. Then when I wrote it out, turns out it's exactly what I did anyway. I unconsciously derived the forumla, yay!

Celebrated my academic victory not over alcohol as the streams of students walking from the unis right now outside my window are going to do, but over a nice lunch of beef vindaloo and Prison Break season 3. S'how I roll.