exams are like a box of assorted chocolates. you really never know what you're going to get. forrest gump made this analogy about life (well, his mom did. but i guess he eternalised it) and i guess you can pretty much generalise it to anything and everything else, which may be a subset of life. including exams, as per our case today.
during my undergrad fresher year, i remember being set a 'paper' on statistics and epidemiology, which comprised of 10 questions (5 on stats and 5 on epi), which was a finals exam, and was accounted for when considering if a student passed or failed the year as a whole.
now, doing a masters, i can't help but laugh when i see (still) a paper being set and only 2 questions from a huge topic being included. and when i say huge, i mean like really broad and deep. for example, my whole undergrad syllabus of pathology was compressed into 4 lectures titled 'immunology' and after reading all the notes and extra materials, they set us a question paper which had only 2 questions on the topic. now, i'm not one to bitch, but isn't that statistically a bad way to evaluate the students' understanding on the subject, as a whole? i hope some of you grasp the irony of how this applies even more so to the undergrad paper on stats and epi i was talking about earlier. it's just mindbogglingly full of fail - whomever set the stats paper, at least shouldn't even be allowed to practice stats. ever. sweet abacus-yielding chinese jesus shuns him.
anyway, that being said, the exams were pretty good, i'm happy with what i got. and forrest gump would be happy too, because if someone asks you if you've found jesus, you answer:
I didn't know I was supposed to be looking for him, sir.
here's looking at you, gump. may you find charlie, when nobody could in vietnam.
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