The Exam that Almost Wasn't

Yesterday was my programming midterm. For those unfamiliar with York we sometimes have exams on weekends. Thus confirming that York drains your time as well as money. I'm close to digressing here so I'll get back on track. My midterm. The one I've been stressing about for two weeks. Enough to spend my entire reading week studying for this. Enough to put off relaxing and my assignment for the same course. This course has a reputation for being the hardest course in the program. Combine that amount of pressure with having the toughest, but best, prof as a lecturer and you'll have me - sweating my balls off since the beginning of the term wondering if I'll flunk out of my major at the midterm.

Subjects covered: Time Complexities, Binary Search Trees, Recurrence Relations, Recursion, Linked Data Structures.

I'm weak on just about everything. Expecially recurrence relations and recursion. Just thinking about them fucks up my brain. They're essentialy mathematical problems that are defined by themselves. It's like writing a Catch-22 in code.

Going over the past exams that week left me dreading what mine was going to be like. The short answer portion covers the entire term so I had to know the facts cold as well as how to explain it. Just saying true, false, yes or no just isn't enough anymore.

The second part covered recurrence relations. I don't get the methods of solving them. Numerical, expansion, it doesn't matter, it's all confusing.

While studying I was convinced this was a weeding exam. The kind where almost half the class fails so they can control the number of people going into higher level courses.

Going into the exam I thought I was going fail. I didn't know what to expect since Chen is the hardest prof in the program. I couldn't even finish the practice exams. The exam itself wasn't that bad however. I breezed past the BST part and the short answer part. The recursion problem was surprisingly easy. The recurrence relation stopped me cold though. I went over the entire exam twice before trying that question. I half-assed my way through and took a guess. I just hope I get above 65%.