I hate exams.
You are sitting at a desk staring at a question on a paper that is broken in to sub questions, one worth disproportionately more than the others. You recognise it as one you didn’t drop a mark on in your coursework submission. You have worked through a couple of pages worth of calculations to find that the answer you have arrived at is wrong. You’ve approached the question from the right direction, and all of your working is there, you’ve just made a tiny error somewhere that’s thrown the whole thing out of balance.
You don’t have time to re-write the question, and even if you did, you can’t see where you’ve gone wrong.
What do you do?
Popularity: 20% [?]
May 10th, 2006 at 9:41 am
File under life, shrug your shoulders and bear in mind that if your path to the answer is sound then they’ll give you most of the marks anyway…
May 10th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Mmh, probably.
Unless they think you think it’s the right answer. It doesn’t really feel right scrawling a little note like ‘I know the above is wrong’. Smacks of desperation.
May 10th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
ouch.
Like Katherine says though, you’re marked on your working. If it’s sound with one small mistake, I guess you have to trust the guy marking it to spot the one point it went wrong rather than marking the whole lot wrong.
“I know the above is wrong” sounds like “I know I’ve wasted my time”; however “I know most of the above is right but I’ve run out of time to find the erroneous step” at least tells the marker to check that your analysis is correct…
Bad luck, you’ll do better in the next exams.
: P
May 11th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
You are marked on working- and you didn’t walk out so I suswpect you have done better than you think!