Exam results

I got my third year first semester exam results yesterday, unfortunately they’re not very good but there’s nothing I can do about that now. Here’s what I got, in ascending order of marks:

Theory of Games and Game Models (35%): Technically I failed this module, although I think the university rules mean that I pass because I haven’t failed anything else and I wasn’t too far under the 40% mark. I don’t know why I did so badly, I expected it to be my worst module because of the amount of maths involved but I thought I’d at least pass it. I understood most of the material, answered questions in lectures and wasn’t completely out of my depth so I don’t understand how I managed to fail.

Digital Wireless and Mobile Communications (55%): Not a brilliant mark, but about what I expected. I think I made one or two blunders in the exam, and unfortunately they were on questions that were worth a lot of marks.

Software Evolution (61%): Not a bad mark, considering that I only managed to answer two of the three questions that we were required to. It was really frustrating, because I knew all the material for this course and was confident of doing well, and with an extra twenty minutes or so I could have answered the last question properly. Given that I only managed to get through about two thirds of the paper though, I must have got good marks for the work that I did do, so that’s some small consolation, and another reason why I think exams are a poor method of assessing understanding of the presented material.

Advanced Databases (66%): In some ways this was a bit of a surprise, as I hadn’t expected to do very well in this module (the lecturer wasn’t very good for a start), but at the same time I expected a reasonable mark given that I know a fair bit about databases. I thought the exam had gone quite badly, but everyone else said the same thing so I suspect the marks were scaled upwards.

Integration in Large Systems (X%): The department isn’t releasing marks for this module yet, as they’re investigating possible cases of plagiarism. I suspect for them to take this measure it must affect at least a quarter of the students on the course, which is pretty serious. The third year tutor refuses to comment on whether the people suspected of plagiarism know that they’re been investigated, so I don’t know if I’m in their sights or not (I shouldn’t be, as I haven’t copied anyone else’s work or let anyone look at mine, but I don’t really hold to the whole “if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear” mantra).

Overall, I think I did pretty badly, although I really don’t understand why. This year I revised more than I ever did – I set aside several days where I was revising 9-5, I went to all the revision sessions that I could (only missing them when they clashed with each other) and I thought I had a reasonable grasp of all the material. Strangely enough, the module that I did the least amount of work for – Advanced Databases – was the one in which I got the highest mark.