So I finished up four of my finals yesterday. Look to yesterday's post if you want to hear about Bib Lit and Data Structures. Diff EQ was... well, diff EQ. Not too hard, not exactly a cakewalk. It took me almost the full two hours, and lets just say I'm glad I studied.
Then I had a nice break from 3 to dinner or so. I didn't look over my comp II stuff like I thought I would, but that's alright, I'd finished my studying during the weekend of mad-crazy studyness. So I show up at the education building at 6, in the lecture hall with the girls in my class and some 40 of Solganick's students. Sharpton and Barbour both say that the stack of our five tests was bigger than the stack of their 40. I wouldn't be too surprised; it was fifteen pages. As I predicted, it was an exercise in speed writing for two hours, but instead of 8385609834 fill-in-the-blanks, there were only 7274598723 of them. And instead of being no essays, there was one of them. I was the first one finished (at 7:45), but I didn't really think about my answers too much. I just wrote whatever came to mind when I saw that question. Good stuff. The essay was kind of interesting. I wrote about censorship on the Internet. Naturally, I was against it. Hopefully Batts won't count off too much for my position. Anyways, insofar as I know, Charissa and I were the only ones to finish. She was in the middle of her essay when I left, and she still had 15 minutes. None of the other three had started yet.
I saw the test and started laughing. It was so completely absurd. I don't know if I've learned anything worthwhile in that class, but I can fill in a bunch of worksheets with words straight from a book (or video or other handout). I find it astounding that an honors class can require so little thought. Particularly a class on "Creativity." The most creative thing I did in there was try to figure what I would do if he had another "go outside for two minutes and come tell me what you did" question. We came up with several good ideas. First, "Practicing dimostratzione of sfumato: I didn't cheat on this question," which, of course, everyone would have to say. Also, "Testing the grader's whole-brained thinking with Arte/Scienza: The Last Supper was created in perfect geometric proportion, using the Golden Ratio (φ = 1.618034)," though I don't know about the validity of the above statement. However, for good or for ill, such a question was not on the exam, so we didn't get to use any of our wonderfully creative ideas.
So that's that. My last final (physics) is tonight at 8, so I'll be studying quite a bit until then. In other news, it appears that Brian Taylor and I will be grading data structures homework next year for Dr. Baas. w00t!
Posted by Gallagher at May 4, 2004 11:46 AM