Passed ... Probably

Before the exam everyone was saying "oh god, I'm going to fail". There was a very ominous air about the whole thing, and while everybody was laughing and joking we all knew this exam was going to be nasty. When we got in we found the papers and sat down. The invigilators did their usual spiel and we started at 3 minutes past the hour. There was a flurry of question booklets opening, and from all of the non-computer scientists pens started scribbling frantically.

The computer scientists all sat and stared at the paper. I supressed my sobbing as I opened the paper, as did most I should imagine. Still, it was only the first question on this page; perhaps there were easier questions? I turned the page and the questions were worse. I turned the page and they looked even worse still.

Eventually I decided to answer the question on game design, the question about illumination models and the question about shading.

As I drew near to the end of the first of 3 questions I glanced at my watch. An hour had gone! Half of my time was up and I wasn't even a third of the way through yet. Crap! I knocked it up another notch (BAM!) and answered another question in just over half an hour. Then I made intelligent guesses at the answers for the last question. Afterall, you can't lose marks for being wrong. You can only gain answers for being right. Hopefully I convinced them that I knew enough to pass the module.

Others were less lucky. The post-mortem began as soon as we were all outside. Some of the answers given by some people sounded ridiculous. I was glad to find that none of my answers seemed wrong, per se. One of my mates only answered two questions (the instructions were: 'answer one question from part A, one question from part B and one question from either section). Oops. There were arguments over the meaning of the word "translation", there were in-depth discussions about what answers were being sought for various questions, then there were in-depth discussions over the interpretation of the questions and the ramnifications the interpretation would have on the answer...

...To summarise this exam was one gigantic mess. It showed little resembelence to what we were taught in the lectures, the questions were a little too vague in places, and there wasn't enough time. However, the good news is I'm quietly confident that I have passed.

Now to start revising for Interactive Multimedia and Formal Methods. *shudder*