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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Wednesday 6 July 2005 (Day View)

Sat 2 Jul | Sun 3 Jul | Mon 4 Jul | Tue 5 Jul |   Wed 6 Jul   Thu 7 Jul | Fri 8 Jul | Sat 9 Jul | Sun 10 Jul |

06.07.2005 – Wednesday 6 July – Results are Released

• I spent a quiet and relaxing morning getting Bronwen’s computer to see my Windows Shares, and then made the mistake of checking my marks and calculating my GPA. The GPA averaging technique seems unfairly biased towards low marks – get a shocking mark once and it’s almost impossible to get your GPA to go up again. It seems to me that there should be some way of discounting once-off failures and obtaining a more indicative result. It seems wrong to penalise someone just because they went badly in their first year, even if they’ve gone really well in all their subsequent years, although looking on the bright side, even if I get abysmal marks next semester, my GPA will be reasonable.

Results

• My results have been released for the past semester’s studies. I’ve achieved a distinction (6) in both COMS4200 and PSYC1030, and a high distinction (7) in INFS3202. CSSE3004 is recorded as “In Progress” (IP) as it is a yearlong course. By this stage of my illustrious university career I’ve learnt that results are not that closely related to anything useful at all – UQ really needs to introduce some method of normalization across semesters. I attended a total of no lectures or tutorials for INFS3202, began the assignment at the last minute and didn’t have time to fully complete it (due to the Oracle server being absolutely crap) and my only study consisted of writing up an index of keywords in the lecture slides, yet I can get top marks. For PSYC1030 I attended all the lectures and tutorials but paid no attention, began its assignments a few hours before they were due (and after spending all night working on other subjects), and would have got a seven had not the exam been sixty-four multi-choice questions. UQ needs to ban the use of multi-choice questions as they quite obviously don’t really test anything at all – someone with a good knowledge of the subject matter is somewhat more likely to get higher marks, but that’s about as indicative as they get. I had hoped to get higher marks for COMS4200, and actually put a lot of work into the assignments (in my own slack way, even starting them earlier than the night before they were due), but sadly I was let down by my group (which was partly my fault for not organizing it better I suppose).
  In summary, I got what I was expecting for PSYC1030 and INFS3202, and while it would have been nice to get a seven for PSYC1030, I didn’t think it feasible given its exam so didn’t try. The courses themselves were a waste of time – I learnt nothing I hadn’t already known since primary school from PSYC1030, and INFS3202 was far too simplistic to be a third level course. COMS4200, on the other hand, was much harder, but still a disappointment – it had the same failing I’ve come to expect from all IT courses, falling firmly into the software engineering basket and not really providing much useful long-term information from an IT perspective. The assignments, while interesting, were group based and hence useless as a way of obtaining marks or measuring my skill and the mid-semester exam was also terrible, containing a stack of trick questions and failing, I feel, as an adequate indicator of anyone’s knowledge of the course material. That said, the lecturer was good and the course well taught.
  I’m not sure what the deal is with CSSE3004. I got eighty-five and a half of twenty-five percent out of one hundred... That’s typical of this course and I’m not sure what it means or if it’s good or bad, and they refuse to release any averages for the exam so I’ve no way of telling how I compare. I’m not even sure if this result has limited my marks or not. Having the final individual exam for a group-based course halfway through the course seems wrong, as a poor mark in the exam limits the possible grades for the rest of the year, and people who get poor marks are hardly going to be productive members of their groups.

Comment by io – Wednesday 13 July 2005, 12:13 AM

  Well done.

Comment by Ned – Wednesday 13 July 2005, 12:43 AM

  Thanks.