What Exams are all about?

Exams, to me can be summarized using one word: CRAP!

Throughout the previous 2 weeks, what I have been writting in my papers are mostly crappy things. When the question is not in the MCQ format and I don't know the answer, I'll just anyhow write something totally without any basis. Just like the way I did my tutorials, which I was lucky enough to get one of them correct. But I guess this sort of things won't happen in this exam.

The first two papers were disasterous and they had to fall on the same day. Operating systems and probability, and I almost had the urge to hand in a blank answer sheet. But it's always still better to have something written, since Pr(score pt) = 0, when the answer is blank, and Pr(score pt) > 0, when the answer is not blank. Judging from how the probability mid-term test was marked, I just have to pray hard that the marker will be more lenient this time.

The third paper was surprisingly the easier paper. Whenever someone ask me what modules I was taking, they would be really shocked to hear that I was taking this module and asked me why i would wanna torture myself by taking an EE module. Perhaps the reason I take this module was that it has really got nothing to do with physics. So it was quite fun taking this course. Recommended if you haven't taken it - EE2006.

The fourth paper was the crappiest. The tutorials were easy (mistaken by Mr. Godlike as primary school maths), but the paper was much tougher. On top of that, after thinking through some parts of it, I found I might have committed some silly mistakes in my counting.

The fifth and sixth paper were on the same day too. The fifth was the morning paper on my GEM. The paper was very straightforward as some parts requires simple calculations, while others you just have to crap your way through. I finished around after 1.25hr, but stayed through the paper's duration as I still had a long break before the final paper. Towards the end, about half the hall was empty.

Soon after the fifth paper, I started my revision for my last paper, and I really mean start. Haven't revised that module at all, since the mid-term test. But given that this was the finale, I really don't have the mood to read. In the end, I managed to finish browsing through the tutorials and understand some concept, which really did come in handy. 30 MCQs, 4 structured. The 4 structured qns are just variations of the tutorial question, but I only managed to do 2 of them, seems like I'm goner for this module too. And from the MCQ section, I had to use this formula at least half the time: CEIL(RANDOM x N), where RANDOM is a function of the calculator that returns a psuedo-random value from 0,1 inclusive, and N is the number of choices the MCQ has. Hope I can get lucky.

Finally, I shall end this very long post with a question from the fourth paper, which I still cannot solve now:

A Professor in the secondary school of magic claims that if he were to plant 5 seeds in an equilateral triangle plot of land of sides 1m, at least 2 of the seeds will be less than 0.5m of each other. Use the pigeonhole principle to show that his claim is correct.

If this helps:

Pigeonhole principle says, if there are more pigeons than the number of pigeonholes, then at least 2 of the pigeons must come from the same hole.

I can't really imagine how can seeds be related to the pigeonhole principle, won't the pigeon just eat up the seeds?