Exam

Good luck boys and girls.

I hope things don't get to technical.

But we worked hard, and I hope it shows in our marks.

Good luck ROtti. Yes, big adventure tomorrow. Hang in there, even if it gets impossibly tough.

Yeah, good luck guys - I'm still cracking on though for a bit more and probably a little in the morning.

And? What did you guys think?

I got stumped on the mullers method a bit, but eventually managed to pull some thoughts together. The derivation of cubic spline equations killed me. I only got about half way. Completely went blank trying to get to the equation for c

Didn't know what to do with the newton's method question. in Q1.

I think its gonna be very close for me.

Very good chance of a re-write.

When is that gonna be? at the end of the year or in a few weeks time?

For now I'll claim to have passed with a certain margin of safety. That's not my honest assessment of the likely outcome. It's just a way of getting about a month's worth of undeserved happiness if I failed. No chance of a supp for me.

I think if I failed again I might just get pigheaded and try the full course all over again.

Hope it goes well for you guys when all's said and done.

With regards to the Newtons question I ignored it and came back later cos it looked particularly wierd. Eventually for the first part I wrote down Newtons method algorithm and then I said what f(x) and f'(x) should be; viz f(x) = x^2 - c and f'(x) = 2. I have no clue whether it was what was required. It was a very awkward way of presenting the question and made my cringe a little.

The second part of the question said derive the root of 7.

So, I messed around and said:
sqrt(7) = x
7 = x^2
f = x^2 - 7

Then I calculated the first derivative to be 2x, and went from there. I think it worked out, cos my second iteration yielded a value sufficiently close to the square root of 7.

Did you guys adopt a similar strategy? Or did you do something completely different from me. Different isn't bad, it will just make me wonder even more about my fate.

I basically made a mess of it somehow. My formula from the previous part came out as x - 2x, for instance, which just has to be wrong.

And now you remind me that the number whose root I was meant to find was 7. Oh dear, oh dear. I was so obsessed with that wrong 2 by the time I came to feeding my formula that it's sqrt(2) that I went and tried to solve.

I hope you don't want to redigest the whole paper like this. Too much bad news to deal with.

On the way home I realised that the reason I was getting such weird numbers for the error question is because I somehow forgot to carry on to the second derivative. So there's another write off. At least there's no supp available. If I've messed up again I probably need to start all over again from scratch, and dot all those i's and cross all the t's properly.

That said, I can confidently state that had I not been involved in all the discussions we've had here, that I would know for sure now that there was utterly no hope whatsoever of getting even close to a pass. The dialog has brought me within range of surviving (if only just), so there's something to be glad of. Always choose to find something to be glad of, I reckon.

Hey, I'm sure you did fine. Lets wait and see....

Sent it flying, man. It was as easy as clubbing baby seals, as a mate of mine used to like to put it.

... OK maybe that's pushing the boundaries of optimism a bit ...

Tried to look at it again last night, and kept going back to the Taylor series. Kept on trying to fit the 7 the sqrt function and 2 in somewhere. Still don't quite get it.
This was the most I've studied for any unisa subject, but I was only tested on like 20% of my knowledge. (a 5th degree Lagrange Polynomial??!! that took forever) No, Numerical integration, Numerical Differentiation, Gaussian Elimination, Bezier Curves, B-splines, Least Square approximations, Neville's method, Newton-Gregory. I studied WAY to much on things that never even got a mention in the exam. Would liked to have written for 3 hours on a 120 mark exam that covered more of the work. Love this subject, and I'm definitely gonna try it again if I fail. But for now its Formal Logic 2 (COS 2661) on Monday. Good luck with the rest of your exams. cfrauenstein@gmail.com

Sorry bud. This really should have been a 3 hour paper and out of much more marks. At the moment when you stuff up a 15 mark question it just kills 15% of your total score. Even worse, out of all the stuff one studies, so little is tested. When you lack understanding of whats tested its game over and theres no opportunity to regain lost ground. Complain to the Director and Rapoo. I might just do the same.