Exams 2008 - part 1

I've never felt so screwed for an exam before... =(

CHINESE: Incredible fail. Paper 2 was fine, but paper 1 was like wtf compared to the other paper 1s in the IB book. I usually get 36-38 out of 40 for those in the past yr question book, but i'll be happy to take like... a 32 for this paper.

ENGLISH p1: ok this wasn't too bad. Prose was handle-able, poem looked workable but prose seemed easier. i don't think i'll do too badly, but i don't know if it'll be enough to cancel out the paper 2 crap that i wrote... hopefully i can still get a 6 (17/25). if i don't get at least 5 (14/25), i'll cry.

ECONS p1: grr screwed up the part (a) cause i didn't study 4.1 that well, got the definition of expenditure approach for 2 sector economy wrong. fortunately i still remembered how to define GDP correctly. part (b) was fine, but i only wrote about fiscal and no monetary policy, which i think is right but i'm not sure, since monetary policy is central bank and not government...

ENGLISH p2: no time. question on characterisation in Siddhartha and Huck Finn. i knew the points, but i screwed up cause i wrote for really long about plot, so in the end i had to change analysing the question from five angles to four and then to three. grrr!

ECONS p2: data response. hmm i did the questions on rising prices of oil and commodities, and the lower lea valley in the london olympics. i had trouble with the definitions, but i think other than that should be acceptable. not good, but acceptable. i hope.

PHYSICS p1: mcqs, not much to say. looks like i got 1 wrong according to bryan. but i'm not too sure also, and in any case it seems quite decent compared to a lot of other people's mcq, so...

PHYSICS p2: option G question was seriously wtf at first until some inspection and thought. then i got the common pressure question wrong, sadly. at least the copper-pot fail one i got right. and the first of the B questions, the one on the regular part of waves. THAT was ok...

MATH p1: incredibly shocking and hard. 14a was a really ??? question (i didn't even see 1st part, fortunately i did manage to achieve some progress by taking the result of area and then calculating the value of theta for which it was acceptable) so i'll at the very least get a few N marks and maybe 1 or 2 M marks for that 9 mark question. some of the questions really looked like a calculator would be nice. ah well other than jarrel i don't know of anyone who finished this paper proper... and of course, the irritating bit is that there's still p2 and we're going to have to count this crap p1 result...

anyway i need to get back into a study mood for comp science and math part 2. given how bad paper 1 went, i better get close to 100 for paper 2. comp science is a just-whack paper... see how.

disturbingly, the exam structure for me sort of has been reminding me of the subterranean animism stage 4 boss battle (jonny, herrick and i dunno who else would know). but basically you're fighting a boss that uses 3 simple patterns and then suddenly, the difficulty jumps into utter crap. granted for me i can't say its true that i find my HLs (the later 3) more complex than my SLs (the first 3) - seriously, english A1 SL is worse than math HL for me - but it feels like that in some way, because essentially the stakes are different. for SLs, the key goal is to avoid focus camp; for HLs, it's to land a spot on the dean's list. hence yeah. diff stakes.

jk.