lessons

You are forever in my life,
You see me through the seasons.
Cover me with Your hand,
And lead me in Your righteousness.
And I look to You, and I wait on You,

I'll sing to you Lord, a hymn of love
For Your faithfulness to me
I'm carried in everlasting arms
You'll never let me go, through it all.

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This exam period, and the results that followed, I can definitely say was a period I'd best describe as learning.

I scored 38 points. This isn't particularly good or bad, it's the kind of in-between, slightly-good yet disappointing result. HLs were good as usual; triple sevens and all possible Dean's Lists were sealed. (I did get owned by Jarrel for Math by 7.5 or so marks, even though I got second place.) SLs, on the other hand, weren't so good, especially SL English which was a major flop.

SL1 English - 5
SL2 Chinese - 6
SL3 Econs - 6
HL1 Math - 7
HL2 Comp Sci - 7
HL3 Physics - 7

The pattern is interesting. Although I noted with Levin during Physics Olympiad today that we both had sequential patterns in our grades (one 5, two 6s, three 7s), I didn't realise mine was really in sequential order! Oh well.

English was terrible. My Unseen got 14, which is the lowest I've ever got this year even though I thought I did a pretty good job on it. I guess I'll have to see Ms Runima or something to go through it, and find out what happened. Set Text got 15 which admittedly was my fault, seeing as I had run out of time - as I did mention somewhere here I had to cut 5 to 4 and then to 3 angles. So essentially I wrote just 60 percent of what I had to say, and in fact less cause I had to cut off and shorten some points due to a lack of time. At least I avoided Focus Camp.

Chinese was so-so. Paper 1 crashed terribly, and though my Paper 2 wasn't bad (23/30), I realised that I should have gotten 26-27 instead as I lost 1 mark for formatting (O_O) and furthermore left out one section out of 7 completely. I'll have to remember: 开头，目的，地点，活动，时间，需要注意的东西，结尾/联络. Grrr. At least I know zhi nan or tong gao are good questions to tackle now...

Econs was strange. I still am not too sure why I'm wrong. The essay part b was basically about how governments can ride an economy out of a recession. I chose not to write about monetary policy, seeing as the question said specifically 'governments' and NOT 'the central bank'. So I got a 7/15 for it. My DBQs went 16-16 and the first part of the essay was a 7/10, so I guess IF I didn't read too much into the question the 7 would be more than safe. I don't feel too bad; getting 70.4 despite messing up this question mean that 75 should be easy if I got things the right way round.

Not too much to say about HLs though, other than I need to work more quickly in Math as I ran down the clock on both of the papers, and for Physics and Comp Science I need to watch out for stupid mistakes rather than just rushing. Levin's idea in Physics Olympiad, that you can sometimes, if unsure, write a big equation and then suddenly collapse it to the answer actually DID get me marks for one of the Math questions, so... =)

What I mean:
(Physics)
'State the Rayleigh Criterion.' [1 mark]
ANS: theta = 1.22lambda / b
(Clarification: That is NOT the Rayleigh criterion. The Rayleigh criterion refers to a situation when 2 sources are just resolvable, where the central maximum of the EM wave produced from one source coincides with the 1st minimum of the wave from the other source.)

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Initially, this exam when I got the results I was terribly disappointed. I wanted to sort-of break down, but didn't. I spoke to a friend after school on Friday, we talked for a while about results and perspectives. Thanks :)

I guess now, I feel quite okay about my results especially since I've learnt stuff from the papers that went wrong.

jk.