Today we had an exam. The past few days have been spent preparing for it by doing endless tutorial questions, and watching too much Netflix. Needless to say, I genuinely believe that exam could have been attempted well without doing any revision at all.
This particular module is called “Electronics IV”, and focuses on active devices (transistors, diodes, SCRs) as well as basic power electronics (motors and generators). The exam was divided up into 3 sections and we needed to choose 3 questions from 6, but still do at least one from each section.
The first question I chose was fairly simple, and focused on the dependance on current gain for a Common Emitter BJT configuration without negative feedback. Next up was a question on Zener diodes, and its use in a linear power supply. I’ll admit this one got me sweating for a few minutes as it wasn’t as straightforward as it initially looked, but I got there eventually.
Finally, the “power electronics” section featured for the most part content we learnt in the first semester in the first year. Now I don’t want to complain too much, but at the back of the exam booklet was a 2 page spread covered in pointless equations that for the past few days Marta and myself have been trying to memorise due to our own ignorance, which is I suppose is our own fault. These were all dedicated purely to this section of the exam, and the entire question didn’t require anything more than Ohm’s Law. Well it’s not all bad I guess. If the mood strikes me and I want to calculate the flux linkage in a transformer I can … for probably the next 5 hours. Which is really my point.
I will be very honest now. I have skipped a lot of lectures this semester and yet I managed to get through the exam in half the time allocated to us. I even checked my numerical answers when I got home with a simulator, and luckily it looks like I was correct. For this semester alone, I have spent £4500 of a loan I will need to repay for the next 30 years after I finish University on lecturers and learning material designed to be taught over 11 weeks, and yet I absorbed 90% of the course in the 5 days before the exam.
Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not particularly intelligent, although others will dispute this. They are wrong though – I have had to work very hard to get where I am now. It’s just the material covered this semester has been so very easy. I was able to do most of this content 3 or 4 years ago, because the information is available for free online and is much better explained. The lectures I did attend spent 10 minutes talking vaguely about the subject in general while lightly skimming over the more challenging aspects, then doing 40 minutes of tutorial questions on the board. It’s not like we get a lot of those. I’d rather do them in my own time than be told the answer before being able to look at it properly.
This is why I thought my time could be better spent staying at home programming our game, which I haven’t actually done a lot of recently. We were going to do some work on it after the exam today which was initially scheduled for 9:00am, but unfortunately they pushed it back to 3:30pm. The entire day has been a blur of stress, tension headaches and explosive bowel movements. Oh, and getting whacked in the right bollock by Marta accidentally in the Co-op. But that’s a different story.
We have one more exam in 6 days, and then it’ll all be over. Then all I need to do is move house; get to Spain and back; take some more driving lessons; start working at my placement; take my driving test and live with 4 Spanish girls for a fortnight. Sound good?
-Matt
Dragon Egg Games 