Foreign Perspectives

The time during the exam just flew in and for the first time ever I didn’t have the luxury of having enough time to check the answers. Having said that, I usually end up “correcting” things to the wrong answer when I’ve lots of time to play with. It was also amongst the most tiring exams that I’ve done too. Since it was effectively made up of around 70 short questions (ie 8 multiple choice, and six from eight short questions with up to 10 parts each) you needed to keep the concentration full-on right through the paper.

The multiple choice questions turned out to be generally quite doable and I’ve only one almost complete guess amongst them when my brain just couldn’t get around a question on red-shifts and Hubble’s constant. Overall on that I reckoned I picked up, on my pessimistic view, around 19.5% out of a possible 28% so half-way to a pass on that bit which was a good start.

Part two on the sun & stars book was generally fine and I could have had a reasonable stab at all four questions. It’s harder to estimate the performance on those ones so I reckoned something like another 18% from that although it could have been higher. Picking the third question turned out to require some thought as I couldn’t do 100% of either of the two remaining with certainty so I followed my thinking from last week and did the one where I could get the highest score rather than just plump for the one that was in my more comfortable topic area.

Part three on cosmology looked horrible at the start. I started off on my two least worst, choosing the one that I thought I could do most parts of first. As it turned out, that was actually my worst question in that section and I think I did really well on the two almost-essay questions in the hard-core cosmology bit. I say almost-essay as whilst the answer for them took the form of an essay the questions were effectively broken up into 15 parts for the second of the two (although it was the most essay-like of the two). Net effect is that for an essay question it looked easy to estimate the marks for it. In the exam I was estimating another 18% for this bit but I think it’ll be a little higher as I checked some of the stuff afterwards.

Taken overall that gives me a pessimistic estimate of around 60% which is nicely clear of the pass mark. High end mark? Maybe into the 70s but I’ll know better when the exam paper is released later this week.

What does seem clear from this is that it’s better to consider the second and third parts of the paper as if they were around 40 short questions that just happen to be presented in four groups. For instance, in one case the part that I couldn’t do in one question amounted to only 2 out of a possible 12 per cent. In fact, with that thinking it’s probably better to aim for the questions with the most parts.

Also notable is that in a lot of cases you had, say, part b (i) introducing a term then parts ii, iii, and iv went on to talk about things related to that. For example, you might have something say “define a black hole” whilst the next part asked what a massive star would leave behind. It’s going to be a black hole, isn’t it? (no, that’s not an actual question from the paper) Because of that, it definitely pays to read the whole question before answering any part of it.

Turnout was extremely low with only three from seven there. As one who’d not been pointed out this was a very lonely course without the proper number of tutorials and I think that contributed to the high dropout rate throughout the year.

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