Same old, same old.

I finished my last final of the semester today.  I'm pretty relaxed about finals nowadays.  Or as relaxed as any sane person can be who has taken final exams for five years and counting. (I do not count high school final exams because they are in no way similar to finals in college.  It's like comparing summer recreational baseball to the MLB.  They are both baseball and that is as close as they get!  The closest a final in high school ever came to a college final was Ms. Hale's AP Chemistry final and even that final would rank in the bottom 2 of the easiest finals I've ever taken in college, but I digress.)

I walked out of my exam room and strolled over to my office in the pharmacy building on campus.  As I walked I felt relieved to be finish with another semester of classes.  Unfortunately it pales to compare to the feeling of last May when I finished my last final of my undergraduate career and felt such a huge sense of accomplishment and excitement.  I urge all of you graduating Seniors, even in high school (yes that means you Jacob) to live in the moment for the next few weeks.  Enjoy every ounce of satisfaction you can from finishing a large chapter in your life.  The next chapters are more exciting but equally more challenging.

As for me, I realized that I had a building safety seminar soon after my last exam.  Then my mind drifted toward getting groceries and cleaning my apartment.  You know, the same old, same old.  Part of me feels disappointed that I do not feel the overwhelming sense of accomplishment as usual.  Part of me knows that in the grand scheme of life, a final exam means about as much as one drop of rain does to the ocean.  I believe this is a good thing, the ability to focus so intensely on something both meaningful and trivial all at the same time can be very gratifying.  So my advice to all this week, enjoy the little things in life, such as finishing finals or enjoying a drink with friends (obviously no alcohol for you pesky high schoolers).

I leave you today with a few interesting tidbits I found this week while procrastinating to study.

First, 40 years of the computer mouse.  Just interesting and fun to see how we how changed technology over the years.

Second, bessel beams?  Yes and they could the tractor beams of the future! (I know completely nerdy, but totally awesome!)

Third, best super soaker ever!

Last, scientists at CERN trapped antimatter for over 17 minutes, which is much, much longer than ever before.  I'm most intrigued by the proposition that antimatter falls up (away from gravity).  Crazy huh?

The Final Exam Theorem (or Postulate)

Wow!  It has been a while since I have written anything new.  I debated shutting down the blog but I really like writing on here.  I wish I could say I was extremely busy, but it actuality that's not the whole story.  Between this semester being nothing more than taking classes and reading literature, and a personal life which has been anything but smooth, finding the time and desire to write interesting stuff has been tough as of late.  However, I have been getting my ducks in a row and I really want to keep this thing going.  (Also, a couple friends of mine have rejuvenated their blogs and I felt inclined to follow suit.  Check them out; Mildly Competent and The Pit.)

Here at Purdue, finals are almost upon us again.  The air is warm, the trees are in bloom, I want to play golf instead of spending hours studying.  This leads me to my first theorem of my graduate career.  I present to you the "Final Exam Grade Theorem."  Now before I get to the carefully derived equation let me explain to you the inspiration behind it.  I felt that the amount of time spent studying can be correlated to your exam score but that as the more you study the less of an increase in you score (not a decrease in your score but a decrease in the amount you can improve your score).  With that in mind here is the equation...

Where EG=Final Exam Grade (out of 100), GPA=Your Cumulative GPA (or what kind of student are you; A student=4.0, B student=3.0, etc), A=attendance rate where 1 is attend all classes and 0 is attend no classes, and t=time spent studying for the final in hours.  Below is a graph of various degrees of GPA and Attendance rates.  It is quite interesting considering a 4.0 student who attends every class needs to study for about 4-5 hours to get a perfect score, compared to the 3.0 student who went to class with him/her who needs to study for 17-18 hours, and their poor 2.0 friend who went to every class with them but still needs to study for 37 hours.  

Now for my assumptions.  I am assuming that a 4.0 student who attends every class can get an 80 percent on the final if they study 0 hours.  And I honestly believe that if you go to every class and pay attention, do the homework and assignments, you can study nothing at all and get at least a C on the final (a genius 4.0 student should be able to do better than that, so I set that at 80).  Next, the attendance rate.  I used the 1/e^(1-A) because it if you attend every class (A=1.0) then it is directly related to how well you have done in school before (GPA).  But as you stop going to class it decreases in an exponential fashion.  At A=0 however, I did not want it to completely eliminate the GPA term, thus the e term to only fractionly decrease your base score. 

Lastly, the time spent studying term. I used my own experiences, GPA, and attendance rates to come up with the constant of 98.7.  And the square root comes from the idea that the more you study, the less of a change in your grade it will make. Overall, I have realized through explaining my theorem, that it is anything but a theorem and more of a postulate at this point.  Meaning it needs to be proven.  I would love to collect data from people and try and formulate a better equation that includes difficulty of the class, pre-requisites taken, and year in school (freshman, soph, etc).

Since I have either throughly confused you, annoyed you, or intrigued you, I ask for you to stew it over and plug in your own numbers to see where you stand.  If it is reasonable, great.  If not, sorry about luck. After I formulated the equation I tried it on my sophomore Physics class as it was my first all-nighter for an exam.  I had a GPA of 3.7 at the time, I went to almost all the classes (A=0.9).  With that, I remember having a 12 hour turn around between finals before my physics final.  I stayed up all night and got a 95% on the exam (I needed that score to get an A in the class, hence the motivation).  If you plug in the numbers to the EG equation it gives about 8 hours of studying to reach the grade of 95%.  If you assume that I ate two meals, and took breaks with my all-nighter that's about 8-9 hours.  Not too bad!