Shining Collection (Exam Results)

The results came back and my reaction is, admittedly, mixed. I must indeed thank God for my positive results in a precious few of the papers like Additional Maths and Computer Studies - but still, what IS a positive result in the first place? I will elaborate on this later. One thing I will definitely have to thank God for will be my average of 81.2%, which though is a sizable drop from term 1, is still a good (in my opinion) result. It's much like the status quo from last year, where Rene (83 plus) and Shaun (82) beat me, and I ended up third just ahead of a clump of people with 79.xx marks (Jarrel, Juzzie, Russell and Daniel all have that kind of number).

I remember Shaun, both prior and during the exams, said he wanted to beat Rene. The thing is, that's essentially the same as saying you want to be the top student (unless he screws up but that's not likely). It's near impossible, since in 2nd Language it's an automatic drop of over 20 points; unless you can go on a dreamlike run for your other subjects, it's hard.

I have categorised the results for my papers into the good, the bad and the ugly. Here goes:

- THE GOOD -
Additional Mathematics. This was not so much of a surprise, as I knew that I would be getting quite high after Mr Chua Kock Yong did the paper review with us. However, I didn't expect to get top of the level still, so this was good.

Language Arts. My score is just below the class average. The fortunate thing was that I had Paper 2 to save my really weak Paper 1. I didn't think this was that good, but when Mr Andrew Wong pointed out that it was an improvement from my previous spamming of 14-15 mark essays, I realised that this was actually good.

Core Mathematics. The flat mark isn't very good, owing completely to Paper II (like quite a few other people, I scored 50 out of 50 on Paper I). Amazingly, though, Jarrel lost marks on Paper I due to explanation as well as carelessness. I am satisfied with barely securing my 90 marks, which only like four or five people in the level did, so it's OK.

IHS. After mis-interpreting the meaning of 'delicate', I thought I'd be lucky if I scored anything higher than 17 points (4, 6 and then 7). I guess my strong spamming of examples in the Hypothesis Based Question helped shadow some of the misinterpretation there, enabling me to get a 10 for the HBQ and hence an overall 20. I was indeed surprised.

Computer Studies. I didn't know what I'd be getting (not very confident in my essays), but then I got 116/120. I really couldn't believe this initially, though I realised that I lost 1 mark for a careless mistake when calculating in hexadecimal, and 3 marks for not leaving comments on a program I did.

- THE BAD -
Geography. I hope you don't find this too offensive, but my Question 3 screwed up my score. For Question 1, I amazingly pulled in a 23 out of 25. However, I think I used too much of the time on question 1 (60 out of the 105 minutes, probably) and hence my arguments for question 3 were relatively weak.

Chemistry. If you haven't noticed by now, when I rate myself on how I did on a paper, usually I look at where I lost the marks in addition to the absolute number itself, and that is why Chemistry ended up here. A ton of the marks were lost on embarrassing careless mistakes in Paper II.

- THE UGLY -

Physics. nice 76. Jarrel, Shaun and even Russell all trashed me here. I really had a ton of careless mistakes, like shortcircuiting the circuit in question B9, and reading batteries the wrong way round (I'm serious). Still, this is my fault, as I barely studied Physics until the day before the exam, and hence my memory of various concepts wasn't very clear.

Normal Chinese. When I took this subject, I expected to be shooting for at least 70 marks, like the likes of Russell and Juzzie. Seems like it was not to be, as I got lower than even more people, like Isaac, Bryan and DNeo. I'm probably like third lowest in class or so, possibly due to a horrendous Kou Shi (24 / 40) and Ting Li (10 / 20). I hoped to get at least a 34/50 for my Zuo Wen, and I didn't. Though my original 32 was fairly close, three and a half marks in Cuo Bie Zi took most of it away. The worst was my Paper II, where I actually FAILED (and I mean LESS THAN 50%).

Actually, the real reason for my mixed reaction would be that though I did reasonably well, there was so much more potential, especially in the subjects where I crashed.

I must blog about CmPS soon, as well as my Game Theory Principle that I used in the exams.

Bye
JK