Week in Review #5: Assignment + test = added stress

We have just finished Week 8. (Time flies.) I have my second assignment due on Monday night, and my second midterm on Wednesday morning.

Since doing poorly on the first test (my first ever test for university), I have decided to change my approach to studying. However, I will continue to make a study sheet, go over tutorial exercises and quizzes, and do the practice test within the 50 minute time frame. I learned from one of my readings in psychology that one of the best ways to do well on a test is to do a practice test according to research; this is known as the testing effect. What I've changed is that I'm starting to use Prof. Heap's slides more wisely. He has encouraged us to make our own annotations in whichever ways we want. I find that writing notes in my notebook isn't as effective as having the slides in front of me, either electronically or on paper. If everything can be seen in front of me, then there's no point spending time writing copious notes. Having the slides printed out or opened on a program such as Adobe Reader saves time; I could highlight things and write down what I think is important to master a certain concept.

I also have the course notes to look at. I can use them to look at concepts in more detail. I'm hoping I can study with friends, too. I have high hopes that the upcoming test will be a success. (I try to be optimistic; I always aim to move forward.) I just need to be careful not to make any silly mistakes.

In addition, Assignment #2 is a bit shorter than Assignment #1, which took us hours to finish. I hope this assignment will be better than the last one, and I can also use this as a study tool for Wednesday. As the weeks progressed, so did my understanding of proofs. I seem to understand the proof structure and scope of indentation. Now, it's simply a matter of practice; I feel I did not practice well enough for the first test. I need to fix up my time management skills.

This week, we began Big-O and Big-Ω. The proofs for both were time-consuming. The big-O of n² means that there is a set of functions with the input being natural numbers and output being positive, real numbers. We also began sorting algorithms. We took a look at a couple examples using Python. They looked very familiar to me because I'm currently taking CSC108.

I would like to wish everyone the best of luck on the assignment and test!