Monday, 15 October 2012

Midterm Reflections

Overall, I'm very happy with how the midterm went. I though it was fair and of an appropriate length. There was definitely some panic that settled in during the few days leading up while cdf was down but in all, I have no complaints about.

I'm eager to get it back, particularly to see how the third (Structural Induction) question was marked.  I'm confident in my answer, but I struggled to present it in what I felt was a tidy, concise format. It felt verbose.

In a similar vein,  I feel slightly awkward stating the Induction Hypothesis for complete induction. In my mind I know what it needs to be, but expressing it symbolically I usually resort to some sort of "true for all i element of {0,...,n} which doesn't seem right.  Even though it conveys the same message, I feel like we've been writing it with an inequality, and that I should be doing the same.

This last point kept getting skimmed over in my review sessions. It was just a presentation detail, and so in studying I wanted to make sure I understood key concepts first before I fine tuned their presentation.  I was thankful today in Tutorial when I got quiz 2 back with some helpful red scribbles rephrasing my poorly stated I.H..  That was exactly the kind of pointer I needed, and now I know!

Looking forwards
I missed Friday's class, but the slides tell me we've started Time Complexity.  I can't remember from 165 if I rocked at this or totally blew it .... but I remember all the key ideas so in all honestly it can't have been that bad.  I need to review those slides. I also need to go over closed form formulas.  Though I understand them when they are presented to me, I seriously struggle deriving them myself.

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