Coding Final

 This is late, but that's because I was working on a final all weekend. I have to admit, I have a lot of issues with the way that this final was run so this is going to be my venting space.

First of all there the time period. All of the homeworks gave us a week or two to get those turned around, and the final was larger but we had 3 days. Something about that seems messed up to me and as though it isn't preparing us for the final exam.

Then there's the time limit itself. This was a coding exam and all of our code has to run in under 15 minutes. This is something where I understand why it happens, it's so that the TA isn't sitting there for 50 years running our code. But this was really the hardest part for me, with the requirements of the assignment I just could not get it until that limit. I got it close, but couldn't quite hit that. And it means that ultimately I had to make sacrifices with other parts of my code to make it less accurate and cut down my grade that way instead.

Finally there's the way that it was graded. We had to generate a model, and 80% of our grade was flat out how well the model performed on a withheld dataset. So if your model is able to classify the data correctly 80% of the time, you have an 80 on the final already. The only way to get a 100 is to have a perfect model that runs under the time limit. This seems absurd to me, primarily because none of our other assignments were graded this way! We never generated a perfect model in the class, it was more can you generate the best possible and is your reasoning clear. Why is this final so different from the rest of the class?

Anyways so at the time of writing, I don't know if this will be curved or not. What I do know is that I need at least a 30 on the final to get a B in the course and that is good enough for me. So what if I also am tanking the average grade from the course? I'm just glad that this class is over.