Finals

I am relatively fortunate in that out of the five course that I take, only three had an actual real finals: Technology Strategy on the 11th of December, Business Technology Management on the 17th, and Principle of Programming Languages on the 19th.

The Non-Finals

Introduction to Information Security had a term test at the last class of the lecture that functioned as a final (with the same hilarity and unseriousness that also occurred in that course's "midterm"), but it's only 15% and happened way before the final period on the 22nd of November. I ended up acing that despite my very long study session of half an hour. Granted, it was easy as long as you attended all of the lecture. Kinda cool that I was able to recall IP subnetting purely during the term test, despite not studying for it in those precious half hour. I derived the way to do it from my somewhat sparse memory of the lecture from two weeks prior where Andi (the lecturer) explained it to us.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship only had a final pitch presentation on the 27th of November with no finals. We had to present the budget, the pitch, and our ask for the startup that we've been ideating (Paul, the lecturer, hate this word, sorry Paul!) during the latter half of the semester. It wasn't hard to do the presentation. Unfortunately, my group got a comparatively lower score for our pitch despite Paul liking it because the two other judge for the presentation (the previous teaching assistants for the course) didn't really find the idea intriguing. Our idea essentially was to make an Uber for personalized tour guides, with an initial launch in Chicago.

Reading Comprehension Test

I have no qualms with Technology Strategy as a course. It's definitely one of my favorite course (which should be evident from the other entries in this journal), but I do have to say that its finals on the 11th kind of threw a wrench on my plan to finally explore Canada after spending the 3 months prior almost always being only on campus. Since the earlier part of my finals week were empty, I flew to Vancouver on the 3rd of December (only a day after I arrived back in Mississauga from Hack Western) to visit the 10 (amazing) IISMA awardees to the University of British Columbia. I wish I could've stayed longer but the fact that I had this final on the 11th meant that I had to return to Toronto before the start of the week after to study for it. Thus I flew back on Saturday 7th of December (the plane ticket for Sunday were crazy expensive).

Just like its midterm, the course's finals is an open book and open note test that you get to write on your laptop, with the only restriction of not being allowed to access the Internet nor use ChatGPT and the likes. Considering that, you might think that this test requires minimal or even no preparation. Indeed that's what I thought as well when I did the midterm, until I saw my very mediocre grade afterwards. The course released a grading rubric for each students midterm alongside explanations for the grading for each of our answers. From the rubric, I realized that a lot of my answers for the midterm missed the expected answer by quite a bit. This prompted me to prepare a lot more for the finals since it's evident the relaxed nature of the test does not imply the ease of getting a good grade in it.

I prepared for the finals since I arrived back in Toronto from Vancouver on Sunday the 8th. The study guide that the lecturer gave us listed exactly which of the many materials for this course (for each week of this course there is a case study, a lecture slide that he seldom uses, and occasionally one or two supplementary reading). Additionally, just like the midterm, there's a case study that sections of the test will ask us questions about. The case study for this one is how Michelin (the tire and star-giving company) undertakes its digital transformation going into and through the 2010s.

Considering the relatively lax rules for this finals, my preparation consist of these steps:

1. Download all of the relevant materials that is listed in the study guide.

2. Run them through ChatGPT to be summarized, and then put the result into a OneNote page in my notebook for the course.

3. Try to read and summarize each of the material on my own and put my summarization into another OneNote page in said notebook.

4. Download all of the OneNote page that has been created into locally-stored PDFs that I will keep open throughout the test so that I can open them immediately once I encounter a question that will need informations from there.

Although the readings for this course is certainly fascinating, they tend to be quite lengthy. Likewise, although the concepts that is examined throughout the course is very intriguing and interesting, the slides are awful. That's not my opinion, it's the lecturer's own opinion throughout the course that the class immediately agreed with. These are why step 3 is relatively time-consuming and isn't easy.

I front-loaded my studying by doing step three as much as possible on Sunday and Monday because I took the calculated risk of going to the Royal Ontario Museum with Azza, Vanya, and Michelle on Tuesday, the day before the finals. We had to go on Tuesday because the museum is free for student on that day. We had to go on that week since our exam schedule (except for Azza whose finals took place at the start of the finals week) was loaded for the week after that. By Tuesday night, I only had to do a summarization for one more lecture slides. So that's what I did on Wednesday, on top of reading up on the case study and reviewing it with Sana, my friend from this course.

And then came the day of the test. Was all of the studying worth it? Ehhhhhhhhh. My honest opinion is that the professor saw how poorly we did (this is not just a cope or projection on my part, in the class right after our midterm grade was announced, a lot of people in the class was asking for the rubric because they got grades that were lower than expected) and then nerfed the finals question immensely. The midterm question was actually challenging, since we had to extrapolate from the course materials, especially for the questions on the case study. The finals question meanwhile, requires the knowledge of using Ctrl+F (the lecturer himself mentioned this in the study guide for the finals). It is essentially a reading comprehension test.

Now it definitely sounds like I'm taking light of this course's test. I will reiterate that this course's test is like an exam on the Indonesian language subject in school. You might think that you're doing well and got everything correct, but later on you get your result and it turns out you only get 70%. It's the sort of test that you legitimately don't know whether or not you'll get good grades. Me saying this test is easy does not imply that I will get a good grade.

With all that said, my opinion is that I could've done just fine only skimming through the material to find the absolutely important points for step 3, instead of the painstaking and thorough reading that I did. The difference in time could've been spent instead in Vancouver. That made me seem like I'm not taking this course seriously, but believe me, I do: I never skipped the lectures except for the last one for Hack Western; I always listen, take notes, and participate during the lectures; and I always read and summarized the case study and supplementary reading(s) for each week prior to class on Friday. All three of those cannot be said to have been done by most of the other students in this course. Point being, I comprehended the concepts in this course just fine even prior to studying for it for the finals, so much so that with the nature of the questions and the lax rules of the exam, I could've done well without the relatively extensive studying that I did.

It was still fun though recalling everything that I studied after the midterm since I actually like this course and what it teaches me.

Recharge

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That Sunday I also prepared for the studying session that I was about to do for MMGT371 (Business Technology Management) and CSC324 (Principle of Programming Languages). The former has no old exam stored in its repository, so I couldn't prepare much other than downloading all of the slide and, once again, run them through ChatGPT to generate an AI summary. Meanwhile, the latter had relatively plenty of old exam, so I downloaded all of them as far back as 2017. I also downloaded the midterms since the exam is cumulative (though obviously there's a larger emphasis on the materials after the midterm.

Triage

Throughout my time here I did triage of my schooolwork quite more often compared to during my previous semesters in ITB. Perhaps it's the fact that there are more leeways here that could be used to do that. For example, I know for a fact that MGT371 is a bird course. Its materials and exams aren't that hard (especially if you're a computer science student since you'd already know at least half of the materials at a deeper length). And also because the people who previously took this course said so (I knew about this later on when I studied together with a friend from this course who is an full-time management student here). The finals for that course is also not cumulative.

In contrast, CSC324's materials after the midterm is not easy. It wasn't going to be like the midterm where I essentially only did almost two day of casual studying just doing a handful of previous midterm questions, with almost no preparation on the day of the midterm itself. As I have said, its final is cumulative so I will have to revisit and redo the midterm materials and exam questions.

Considering all that, I made the decision to almost solely focus on the CSC324 instead of the MGT371 final. So the amount of studying that I did for the latter is only an online study session with Hanson (a knowledgeable and diligent friend in this course who very kindly shared all of her notes with me) and a quick recap half an hour before the final with two of my other friends from this course: Abdi and Russell. You might say that I should've studied more for this final, but I disagree. This course's slides are kind of barren and non-specific in term of its content so there's not a lot that can be studied from there other than pointers that I would need to explore and lookup on my own. Hanson's notes, which is quite exhaustive of all that the professor said during the lecture, is also only six pages long. There are no previous years finals that are available for this course. I have done and prepared for the prep question that was given in the last tutorial for this course. The fact of the matter is, there's not a lot in this course that can be studied for its finals, so allocating more time to study it would be sort of futile.

I'm really proud of my answer in one of the five questions that asked about an example of a global problem and how IoT can solve said problem. I answered it by recalling a very specific speech from a celebration back in 2022 of 40 years of informatics engineering education in ITB. In the event, there was this speech made by a 2008 alumni of my major who went on to build a company called eFishery (I know that name is embroiled in all sort of scandal nowadays but that's beside the point) that uses IoT and AI/ML to assist Indonesian shrimp farmer in shrimp farming. I think I had a lot of edge on my answer compared to others by explicitly mentioning how it is drawn specifically from a real-life startup in Indonesia. On top of that, I also threw in almost verbatim from the speech one very specific service provided by eFishery and how it helps shrimp farmers to cut operational cost.

After I did the finals for this course, I think I made the right choice. Why? Because I was able to answer all of the questions just fine. I do think that I could've studied more on the issue of IT governance though, since I struggled a bit with the question that asked me to define a governance and ethics framework for a specific company scenario.

The Hardest Finals of All

As I've said, I decided to dedicate the entirety of the week towards the CSC324 finals that I deemed as hard. I was locked in in the library to read up on the slides, and exercise with the midterm and finals up until the exam on Thursday at 5PM. Thankfully, one of the hardest materials during the course, using the ambiguous choice operator to solve problems, didn't come out during the exam. As for the second hardest material, using the miniKanren relational programming "language" to solve problems, I only managed to solve it halfway but think I answered every other questions correctly so the last and hardest final is definitely a win in my book. For this one I definitely didn't regret studying as hard as I did.

Both Sense of the Word

After I finished the CSC324 finals, I immediately encountered a great stream of sadness. I felt sad because although it would still be another week (which will pass by so quickly that I won't feel it) before I need to go back to Indonesia, that last final still marks the end of an era, the end of my study here at UTM along with the many great knowledgeable people that I encountered. For that reason, this last final is definitely without a doubt more bitter than sweet.

God I wish I could stay longer here.