Exam feedback

I see only 2 people wrote this exam as no one else is commenting?

There's not much to say.
I thought it was a fair paper. Considering I had two weeks to prepare after my last exam I should have done a lot better but I left the pumping lemma question out because I didn't have time to cover that section properly.

Hi,

Yes the paper was fair, no big surprises. I wish that there was a bit more time.

The one thing that I was wondering about, is that there was a guy behind me that still kept on writing after we all the left the exam hall after the exam.

Can a person apply for an extension of the exam time???

As mentioned before, I noticed that a lot of the questions came from the 2004 exam. I made the mistake of going through the solutions at home ..... hopefully they are going the mark the correct 1/2 of the questions that I've answered 1/2 way correctly!

I think it's like in highschool, if you have some kind of physical (or mental, I'd imagine) handicap, you can get extra time.

I thought the exam was okay.
Anyone else think it was strange that the Pumping lemma question defined a language where the elements had to be the length of a prime number?
I was thinking that if we assume that there are K states we can't assume that k is a prime number, and so that there is a word a^kb^k
Anyone else think that was odd?

I agree that it wasn't too bad, although I did battle with a couple of the questions. One of the few exams that I have had to stay till the end.

I was a little upset that after getting the exam tutorial letter which mentioned blue paint, that they went and asked Q10 on anything but blue paint. Can't understand why they would want to send the TL out at all if it is only going to be a distractor.

I thought blue paint was one of the answers?

I can't recall the exact short questions in Q10. If I recall it was something about name a method for determinism.... but with the longer part being about how to determine if the given FA's had finite or infinite states, I don't see how blue paint could be applicable there. Don't think it was applicable to 10.1 or 10.2 either?

Please correct me if I am wrong. Anyway, if it did make up the answer to a one point question, then was that the special attention blue paint required?

I also thought the exam was very fair. Easier than I was expecting actually. (I say that now, but should probably wait for the marks )

Blue paint can't be applied to Q10 as far as I know. I didn't use the "blue paint" method at all. Used the N <= length of word < 2N method for Q10.

I was a little pissed that around 40% of the questions came from the last three chapters - which I obviously did not cover at all.
I spent soooo much time on Chapter 7, creating Regex'a from TG's and creating FA's from Regex's - and there was 1 lousy question on it.
The induction question bugged me a little. I could not, in my semi concious state figure out what the wanted from the given equation. I also spent a lot of time on recursion and induction during my 2-3 preparation.

I'm really dissappointed that I did not prepare more for this one. If I do pass it will be just, and will be my worst mark to date.

Having said that, I'm really glad the exams are over. It's being one helluva year.

Now - back to work.