17/1/12

There's nothing worse than opening an exam paper and having no idea how to answer the first question. Actually there is, an exam starting 20 minutes late due to a missing paper for someone who hadn't even turned up and then opening the exam paper to see you're missing section A and only have section B and then not being able to answer the first question!

Section A wasn't that bad really, a couple of tricky bits but good on the whole so hopefully a few marks in the bag there. Section B was a whole other kettle of fish though - It's a choice of 2 out of 4 questions and it immediately became a matter of "which of these questions contains the least stuff that I don't know". I did one question, although couldn't do a big chunk of it - mainly because we'd been told in the lectures that we wouldn't have to reproduce the derivation...

Choosing my second question was more difficult, 1 was eliminated straight away and the other 2 were fairly evenly matched with about half of it that I thought looked doable. I picked the question of superconductors, that meant I'd picked 1 question from each of the lecturers, and I like super conductors. For the first half of the question I went above and beyond the "call of duty" writing lots about it, because it's an area I'd actually revised well, and in a bit more depth than the notes (mainly because they made no sense!), so hopefully that will make up for the fact the the rest of the question was a no go. A good chunk of the remaining bit was about a compound which I knew we'd covered in lectures, and I'd written about in my revision notes but I just couldn't dredge any information about it from my brain so I wrote down a few points which might be relevant and then moved on!

Due to the late start I had until 7.50 to finish the exam (that's depressing!), pretty sure they were offering me too much extra time again, but I opted to leave at 6.35 having checked everything over. I dread to think how early I'd have finished if I'd been writing at full speed and without a break in the middle! Anyway that's over now. I'm pretty sure none of that is ever going to be relevant to me in the future so I can now forget everything anyone's ever told me about solid state chemistry (assuming I don't need to re-sit it!)

I'm having the night off revision, work for Friday's exam shall begin in the morning! We have a revision seminar for next week's exam too, so that'll break the day up a bit!

And the photo...
Before the exam, what a lovely evening it was turning out to be...shame I was going to be stuck inside!

And after the exam, yep, all the niceness gone! (apologies for awful photo!)