Tuesday, October 07, 2008
- sqrt(1-v^2/c^2)
ive gotten back all my prelim results already! and though its sad that i am still performing under my own expectations i think i improved alot yay!Subject Mark (%) Grade Rank Percentile * General Paper H1 55.5 C 84 91% Mathematics H2 82.5 A 53 94% Physics H2 78.3 A 24 94% Chemistry H2 75 A 73 91% Biology H2 64.9 B 101 75% Economics H1 47 E 7 85% Physics H3 72.5 Distinction 2 91%
for the FIRST time in my ENTIRE JC LIFE, i have 4 As!!!! FOUR As!!! and proper As, not moderated ones! When i received my h3 paper and saw the A on it only the immediate presence of classmates and teachers stopped me from going crazy right there and then :D and i think that in this whole school, no one else execpt wei quan has had to sit through the amount of papers i had to. even hp, the other 13 AU person here, has finished his h3 exam already. and as far as i know only wei quan takes 2 moe h3s. so even though 4/7 isnt really much i daresay its worth anyone else's 5 As >:D
GP - comprehension was insane. the passage and questions arent incomprehendable, but the mark scheme sure as hell is. it is so imba strict that the cohort average is a U i think and the 3 of us who got 24.5/50 are the top in the class. there was one question worth 1 mark but 3 points all need to be present to get it. and if youre going by a half-mark system, to quote the head teacher of GP "it doesnt take a mathematical genius to know what that means" -.-. Essay was a bit better but still fell short of my BT2 model essay standards. i wonder how those HP people still managed to get their As. anyway i think they are just trying to scare us into studying for gp which most people dont bother to study for.
Maths - owned upside down by carelessness. if not i could conceivably have gotten 85 or above. when i was supposed to add the length of a circle's diameter, i went and added the radius. even after having so much time to check during paper 1 some stupid stuff still slipped under my radar. paper 2 was worse, totally blanked out at the sequence and series question, and misinterpreted the binomial question. the end result was 88 for paper 1 and 77 for paper 2. time to spam sequences and series practise questions le...
Physics - again for the FIRST time as they were flashing the top ranked students' names i was actually near the top of the list! even though rank 24 is actually quite pathetic when you compare with stanley and kheexuan but ill take it when i get it. anyway my stronger subjects happen to be maths/physics/chem and i dont see how its possible to dethrone the PRCs in these areas. before prelims ended i ran into mr thomas one day and he told me i got nearly full marks for the question he marked (19/20 for a paper 3 section B question) but i didnt dare get my hopes up. then there was another question in which i decided to take a shortcut and use a neater method, but i didnt write the shortcut (using a moving object as the frame of reference) down in my working and got 1 out of 3 marks because the marker thought i got the answer by sheer dumb luck -.-. anyway i think my physics result is decent, though sadly not above 80.
Chem - careless again, especially so in paper 3 and again in paper 1. i thought paper 3 was extremely easy but when i got it back my score wasnt anything special to shout about except that i got imba full marks 20/20 for one of the paper 3 questions yay. in paper 2 my organic chem nearly failed me for the first time, and would have if i didnt take bio (so many protein questions). not good really, a bit less carelessness and i could have conceivably gotten 80+ too.
Bio - what the hell does it take to get an A in this subject?! its the only subject that i put an insane amount of studying into and yet that elusive A still will not yield itself to me >_<. Screwed up my paper 2 extremely badly due to poor time management. the essay was SO EASY but i threw nearly all the marks away because i spent too long on the structured questions and ran out of time. i actually finished drawing my genetic diagram thinking it was for F2 offspring...then looked at the question and realised it was supposed to be a TEST CROSS. SHIT. i cancelled the whole page out and had to redraw. from then on i totally dashed through the remaining questions and left a hell lot of blanks everywhere. Anyway over the weekend i went crazy over applications to try to save the situation with paper 3. and this time i started doing the essay first. and it worked and i got a good score for paper 3 so at least i didnt get a C overall. but when you see the rest of the people from the bio STP class getting As left and right its very demoralising...
Econs - i dont know. i really dont know. i dont trust myself at all when it comes to econs, i just write what i think is logical and pray that it is correct. i think i am going to spam lots of econs and do lots of consultations before A levels, because an E, even if its one of the better-ranked scores, is still the thing that is besmirching this list of grades.
H3 - after the fiasco in BT2 i wasnt expecting too much, especially since i had very little time to study this and my solid state physics is still shaky. even when i got my paper back i wasnt sure if 72 was that good because the score distribution wasnt shown. besides i was too busy being happy about 4 As lol. anyway, special relativity and photonics for the win! i managed to get nearly full marks for the questions on them, making up for my lousy performance in the quantum theory of light / solid state questions. i still wonder why i didnt do the quantum mechanics question...i could have gotten 76 if i did it. stupid helium neon laser. then when i got back and checked the isp and it said i was SECOND...*happiness*. but i still feel quite unsettled as the paper seems quite easy, a levels might be a different game altogether and i shall have to be prepared.
so yay im rather pleased with all my results so far. quite a good improvement from BT2 and certainly much better than BT1. i feel quite secure for the a levels now! :D
