Spent the last few hours or so after getting back binging on my laptop; which has been little more than a glorified paperweight - occupying valuable real estate on my table which I'd like to think of as being in a state of deshabille but is unfortunately just plain messy - these past few days.
I'm not sure when it was that I started to find a certain serenity during these exam period. The days kind of blend into each other; paper after another, very idyllic (not idle, of course!) Even when rushing to cram for the next paper; those desperate 2 hours or so between Econs Paper 2 and Bio Paper, as I just sat there alone flipping at frantic pace through that stack of 7 or so topics, there wasn't really much stress to speak of. Going home straight after the paper to catch up on last night's sleep; cram again, rinse and repeat. Very simple; kind of unlike the bulk of our papers up till now xD
Now for some random spam on the prelims xP (You've been warned)
I've already alluded to Econs; basically didn't manage to finish writing any of my essays; didn't really allocate my time fully and spammed too much on that Merit and Public good question, which compromised the latter ones.
Bio was pretty manageable; thanks to the separation of application and core syllabus; which makes that whole smorgasbord of topics marginally digestible. Heh I think I relapsed into my RI form for Bio; where I approached each question with a little too much enthusiasm; literally spamming everything I knew, with little regard to the actual nuances of the question. I'll term it the "shotgun approach" (not to be mixed up with that DNA sequencing technique). The metaphorical shotgun may have metaphorically backfired though; since I didn't manage to finish the essay despite having a solid 30 or so mins left to tackle it. I got a little too complacent towards the end, methinks. I actually spent awhile debating with myself which question to attempt by trying to mentally list down the points I had for each. Not an optimal approach; hindsight tells me. Death by choice indeed... Shouldn't do too badly; though it's always impossible to tell, with Bio. It's always the analness of the answer scheme that trips me up; though I do realize it's got to do with my general ineptitude as well.
Chem was a disaster, to put it simply. It's probably the subject that I have to pay the most attention to right now; since I should be able to do it, can't give myself excuses like not having practiced enough since that's all down to my general laziness. Lost marks left right center; the most I can hope for out of Paper 3 is a pass. It's quite telling that when the thing started and I was briefly scanning the questions (hoping to eliminate the toughest, you see) and I started crossing things out; I quickly realized that there were none that I was confident in dealing with...
Math was a mixed bag. Paper 1 had those standardly non-standard pure math questions that just made me go "WTF!" stare at them for awhile; scribble something onto the paper; cancel my scribblings only to rewrite them all over again along with those really run-of-the-mill questions that I should really have been able to attempt much faster. Chalk it down to lack of rigorous practice, I guess. Speed could be further optimized. Paper 2 was actually a little fun to do; while I was initially worried about the time, after spending way too long on the first few questions; the statistics part was a breeze, as there's really alot less thinking and alot more regurgitating to do. Should be fine even accounting for the fact that I probably messed up the probability questions. My paranoid side fears that literally everything could have been wrong and I would have still walked out thinking that I did fine; but I hope that wasn't the case lol. The pure math part was the "fun" part; since imo, it involved alot less technique than in Paper 1 and required more thinking and problem solving. Heh, maybe it was a no-brainer for the rest of you who did it, but when finding the points of intersection of the tangent in the parametric question, I was randomly multiplying and cancelling terms, and it felt so good after managing to whack out the answer :D Ditto for the last part of the AP GP question, where after staring at it for awhile - with the very frequent glances upwards at the clock to see how many precious minutes were remaining - I finally began to see the glimmers of a solution. As frenzied scribbling followed; with each line of working taking up like 2 lines of foolscap; the pieces started to fit together, and realizing the last part of the puzzle - to multiply by 3/2 - to get the answer was so gratifying. Hahaha I can see how that feeling of gratification could get pretty addictive; it's just that so often there's so little time under exam conditions that the stress overwhelms everything and I'm unable to think straight. I'm normally unable to "see" the solutions for such questions, so good job for managing it this time, Chris! XD The vectors question was a nightmare; though I'm pretty confident that all my steps were correct; they didn't give us any "save points" at all! So I was just doing, doing, doing; and hoping really hard that I hadn't overlooked any careless mistake that would doom the rest of my marks. Especially so given that I've got a bad track record with such mistakes.. Lost >7 marks in CT2 cause I was rushing and did the dot product wrongly, getting 5x5 = 5 instead of 25 or something like that. Even worse was that when as I was done with one part and was checking the working; I realized that I had made 1x1 become 2 lol. Not exactly confidence-boosting material.
Hahaha, that's it for the Prelims spam this week (Y) My predicted grades aren't looking too good atm; GP, Math and Econs are already decided; so all that's left are Bio and Chem (well duh). Bio looks fine, but Chem...urgh...very jialat alr, it'll be a miracle if I can maintain CT2 standard.
And now, a short (PSA) by a friendly, stoned lemur:
Credits SY for showing it to me so long ago :D
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