School/Uni Help Thread

I don't understand why anyone would want them after Christmas. Surely it makes more sense to do them when the information is fresh in your mind rather than having them 4-6 weeks after your final class. Also it means that you can enjoy your Christmas/New Year without always having the thought in the back of your mind that you'll need to start studying for exams at some point

 

I actually don't mind doing them afterwards, there is plenty of time to enjoy christmas, doesn't mean you cant do 1-3 hours of studying in between over a couple of weeks.

This change doesn't affect me anyway since i am in 4th year, although might if i get into a masters next year.

 

I had exams after Christmas, it gives you the extra time to revise.

 

I'm just finishing my second year at college and also went back after 4/5 years working, how did you find the youngsters? I'm doing better now than I ever could have had I gone through with it all when I first should have, what stopped you doing it after school? What uni you at now?

 

At Strathclyde uni we have just had a referendum on having our exams before Christmas instead of after. Exams after Christmas is horrendous and the difference between the average marks of exams in January and may is absolutely staggering.

 

This doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

 

Uni year starts September/October. Exams before Christmas gives you little time to prepare given that the first semester is usually 12 weeks. All the lectures won't have been completed until around the second/third week of December. Am I missing something?

 

Yes. Uni here starts in September. Usually early in September, but it's not uncommon for term to start around the 21st as well. We, for instance, have 11 weeks of classes and then a full 10 days break before the exam diet begins. There is plenty of time to study. And, more to the point, most students prefer it that way.

 

My course starts the second week of September. Runs for 12 weeks but lectures finish in week 10 with a revision lecture in week 11. So first semester would have finished November 13th or around then. This gave me 3 weeks to study. I much prefer this to finishing in December, going on holiday for 5-6 weeks then coming back and doing exams

 

It really depends when the semester starts. Those with exams before Christmas start about 2 to 3 weeks before those that don't. You may be correct about not having enough prep time however I think I would rather a week solid of revision/ exams than having a few weeks celebrations and straight into exams.

 

You don't go straight into exams, they are the last 2 weeks of January, if you are lucky they are almost a month after christmas, plenty of time to study as well.

 

When I was at uni Semester started around 21st September, we would then have lectures for 12 weeks and then we would have between 18th Jan- 28th Jan for exams, and start the next semester around 3rd Feb. From my own experience I thought that was enough time to plan my revision and so on and get on with it. Usually by the end of first semester in yr 1+2 I would have been doing 4 modules and on top of that I would have stats exams...third year was a * because of thesis. To be honest, it did not bother me at Christmas/NY because I never started revising till 3rd Jan anyway :smiley-laughing002:

I suppose there are perks to having exams before or after Christmas, even though from my experience having them before Christmas would have put me under a * of a lot of stress and when it came to going into exam hall I would have been saying "I wish these exams were in Jan instead" lol

 

The last two years I have come done from Shetland and had 4 exams in one week from about the 6th. It doesn't always happen but it can and is horrible when it does.

 

Anyone familiar with the SPSS statistics program?

Complete headfuck.

 

Is it like an excel equivalent made by IBM? I know of it but never used it.

 

Yeah it's essentially just a program that analyses data sets and produces graphs, charts, etc.

I'm weak in Quantitative methods, no idea what I'm doing.

 

I used it last year a few times. Not bad as long as it's used properly.

 

I use Bloomberg, Excel, and LIM for Quants. But Id imagine it all does the same stuff. Give me a shout if there is anything I could help with.

Is this part of a uni course?

 

Could you tell me how I would look comparatively at two data sets over a period of years?

For context, I'm using data from the British Election Panel and I'm trying to find out whether readers of Tory newspapers voted Tory in 1992 but then voted Labour in 1997 due to the partisan shift of their newspaper.

 

Thanks Sween, I appreciate it.

I'm doing my dissertation and I'm seeing my advisor on Wednesday who primarily uses SPSS, so he wants it done on that. I did a Quant class last year but can barely remember anything useful from it.