Wednesday 23 November 2011

Webct Nottinghasm

Hello world. My Nutrition Energetics coursework was done just two hours ago so I'm free to do my Techniques (and the Biochem, and the Genetics, not to mention the studying...) In short, I'm one quarter through my quartet of coursework that has to be done.

Haha, I was planning to go to webct and into Google I typed: webct nottinghasm. Somehow the 'hasm' ending made it rather hilarious.

Anyway, going for CF later, before coming back to do Techniques and maybe some Genetics.

Seriously, I don't understand Genetics. Lecture One of Mendelian, I went, 'AH, I know this.' Lecture Two: Hmm, this sounds interesting. Lecture Four: What is she talking about? Lecture Five: Her explanation makes it even more confusing. Lecture Six: I give up. Notify me when you understand the topic.

The funnest (sorry, the most fun) thing that happened this week was yesterday, right after class. Av, Ash and I were planning to go to the TCR on the third floor of the library to do our Energetics online coursework. Momal decided to come along with us since Dinie was absent. Went all the way up to realise that the entire class was booked, so Ash suggested going to the top floor of the TCR building.

Made our way there, found to our joy the emptiness of the entire place so we all sat down with each other. Pulled out the trusty calculator, pencil, rough paper and notes, and typed in our passwords et al to enter into webct. I managed to load my desktop, but couldn't enter webct since they kept giving me the wrong password notice. Frustrated, I turned to Ash. "Dude, they won't let me go into webct!"

"You think that's bad?" Av piped up. "My computer's not letting me load my desktop." See, in the Nott computers, they have that Switch User window, in which every student must key in their ID and password and the computer will load that student's desktop. But Av couldn't get past that either.

So both of us swapped computers, to no avail. We moved from one console to another, almost a total of four times. Momal and Dennis had to leave so it was just the three of us now.

Finally Av and Ash got theirs on, while I was still having trouble with webct. After a bit, I finally figured out what I did wrong (clicking directly on the Log In link instead of going through webct's main site and clicking on the Log In link there) so I managed to get in.

So you have three students, all opening webct to the same page, and we did a bit of last minute revision before I finally said. "Shall we do it now? One, two, three." We clicked the Start button, Av half a second after me, so his timer (we had only 1 hour) was half a second slower than mine.

The first 10 questions were MCQs, and then they had five structural questions. Managed all right on the MCQ with one very careless mistake, and the structural stumped us for a bit since it involved quite a bit of calculation. So there we were, going through the questions, and our conversations went somewhat like this.

"Question 2. Gross Energy." Flip, flip, flip. "Hey, which page of the notes? Which slide?"

"This one, before Metabolisable Energy."

"Ok. Ah, I got the answer. It's the second one."

"OK. Confirm?"

"Confirm. Click 'save answer'?"

"Yep."

Silence for a minute.

"Guys, I don't know question 5 so I'm going to Question 6 ok?"

"Yep. Hey what's the answer for question 4?"

"Uh.....third one I think."

You get the idea.

The structural part was rather funny cause we had only half an hour left and we were just doing the first question. So it was,

"Hey, they're asking for components, not factors--"

"Guys, we've got 30 minutes left."

"Oh, really? Ok then, must hurry up."

The later questions included lots of calculations and our entire piece of rough paper was thoroughly scribbled on. On one hand, Av and I were debating with Ash the different methods of calculating what they wanted (because we had no idea, NO IDEA, how to get what they wanted - it wasn't in our notes - so we estimated) and thank God we managed to convince Ash because our answer for that question turned out to be correct.

Then we were all stuck at this very long and very complicated question, and I told Av how I got my answer, and our answers were a decimal place off (since I rounded up and he didn't) but we both scored on that so we assume there's a range of answers. The clock kept on ticking.

On the last question, we did calculations but were unsure if it was the right one or not. So Ash and Av were discussing and I checked the timer.

"But they wanted yyyyy and we did xxxxx so need to add this--"

"Guys, there are 2 minutes left."

"OK OK, so are we gonna put this then?"

"We should right, cause I don't see any other way we can do it--"

"One minutes 30 seconds left."

"Yikes. So, do we all agree on this answer?" Rattles off a series of numbers.

"Yup. So we put lah?"

"40 seconds left."

"OK. Finish? OK."

Clicked the Finish button at 30 seconds to spare, Ash almost died when his computer hang-ed, but luckily it managed to save the rest of his answers in time so it was ok. Got a rather decent score for that one.

And when we left the TCR with sighs of relief, we all got a migraine.

Wednesday 2 November 2011

Scrambled Eggs

Finally, the lab report for Techniques is done!

One down, one more to go!

Next Monday is a public holiday, so this means I'll be going back to Semenyih probably only on Tuesday morning as I have afternoon classes then. Plant Science coursework being a usual pain in the neck, but I've gotten used to the bite marks and am getting my head in the game by finishing it by today, at the very least. Asyraf says he's going to hand in both his lab report and PS coursework this Friday so I'm quite determined to do the same as well.

I've begun a habit of setting my personal deadlines for every coursework/lab report I'm given, eg if the deadline is 8 Nov, I'm setting my deadline exactly one week earlier. It helps to keep me in check, and besides having extra free time not spent on coursework, it means that I can get them out of the way for something else, and I don't have to scramble around last minute like a bunch of beatened eggs.

Scramble. Eggs. Scrambled eggs. Geddit?

At least I managed to finish my lab report today i.e. on the deadline I set personally since we're supposed to hand it up next Wednesday.

AHA!

I've finally finished my Plant Science coursework! Of course, I'll still need to do a little bit housekeeping here and there, but the general idea and everything is done! I'll probably go through it once more, get everything down to pat, print it out tomorrow and hand it in on Friday.