Revision

I really should not be blogging right now. I should be either studying, eating, or sleeping. Which is mostly what I've been doing these days. My daily schedule has been: eat breakfast, study, eat lunch, study, nap, study, eat dinner, study, sleep. Seriously, that's it. So I really shouldn't be blogging. But my pen ran out of ink so I thought this is a good time to take a break and blog.

What's really funny is that we talked about blogging during Chinese class today. I think we were supposed to read an article during break. I vaguely remember the teacher mentioning it but I also remember having no clue what she said. Imagine someone saying "blog" with a Chinese/British accent... Anyway, none of my classmates blog apparently. They all tried to compare it to Facebook. We discussed it in groups of 2 and 3 and my partner said he's never touched the stuff. And here I am with 2 blogs... haha. Anyway, I suggested to him that when he does his study aboard in Beijing University, he should keep a blog since he'll have friends in the UK. He seemed to like the idea. I would've talked more about this subject since I have a lot to say except I 发现自己不会说普通话。I haven't revised (this is the term they use here instead of study. So it's revision not studying.) any Chinese stuff. The only Chinese stuff I've been doing is listening to music. Apparently that doesn't help very much. I've gained a couple of vocab, maybe.

Anyway, exams. I have to take 7 engineering exams and have taken 2 so far. They were last Friday. I'm really glad I already have 2 of them over with. I really can't tell you how I did. I have nothing to compare it to. It's not like at MIT where I can be like, "well, it wasn't as hard as the midterm."

In all of these exams they let you chose (usually) 3 out of 4 questions to do. All my engineering exams are 1.5 hours long. There is 10 minutes of reading time beforehand where you can read but not write anything. You're supposed to chose which questions you want to do in that time. Unfortunately, in the first exam, I read through all the problems, thinking "which one do I NOT want to do...", and then concluding that I didn't want to do any of them. Sad. I think I managed to make pretty good headway through the 3 that I chose to do though. The 2nd exam was better. It was water engineering and 1.060 (fluid mechanics, sophomore spring semester) gave us really good preparation for this class. So the reaction to the problems was the opposite, "if they give me more time, I can do all of these."

But of course, they don't give you enough time. I think I know the material but it takes me time to think. If I were to memorize everything, the procedure to doing each type of problem, and just don't think when during the 1.5 hours that we have, then I would finish the exam. But I can't do that. (1) Way too likely to make a mistake and (2) I don't think I can physically do that. Anyhow, unless everyone memorizes everything, which is unlikely given that the regular students have 10 exams to take in a period of 3 weeks, I think the end result is pretty much the same as in the US. At MIT, if we don't feel like we were given enough time for a test, we can request that the next test be shorter or given more time. So the distribution of grades are higher and the students feel better about themselves. So I mean, it's the same deal in the end, just an A here is 70% whereas an A in the States is 90% (generally speaking). Conclusion: I think Americans like to feel good about themselves, even if it's fake.

I've also updated the MIT blog with a couple of entries. They aren't very exciting but people have left comments so must be okay.