Kieran Senior

• Published:May 27th, 2008
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I’ve just got back from a two hour exam on data structures and advanced programming.  I know the course content like the back of my hand, yet today I’ve left that exam room knowing I’ve got a 2:1 in my degree.  Why? You may ask.  Because I spent almost three quarters of an hour answering one of the biggest questions of a breadth-first topological ordering of an acyclic directed graph where I later found that I had missed out one of the vertices in the adjacency list.  That’s right, it does screw up the entire answer, so guess what I spent the next half an hour doing? Almost having a panic attack.

Additionally, this exam was the ultimate finish to my degree, because if I had got a first in it (which I haven’t) I would’ve got a first in my degree.

How pissed off am I? I’ve just thrown a first class honours degree down the drain all because I messed up one question in the exam.  One bloody question.  I feel physically sick.  Oh, and we did figure out the markings afterwards, and I haven’t got every other question correct as was rightly pointed out to me.  Because I ended up panicking so much I ended up screwing up some of the final questions.

Joy to the world.

EDIT: Well, due to my extenuating circumstances (that is, because I’m officially not supposed to be at university this year due to illness) I’m allowed to defer meaning I can retake the exam in July and still get the maximum amount of marks.  It does mean however that I’ll need to re-study the course material, and I will have a different exam paper, but it gives me an extra chance to get a first class grade.