This past Wednesday turned out to be extremely curious. We took an absolutely monstrous exam, next to which all our previous torments pale in comparison. In my memory, there have been only two truly terrifying subjects like this one: artificial intelligence(2 exams) and databases(2 or 3 exams). For databases, I barely scraped an automatic pass in all cases, and with artificial intelligence I managed to cope, but at the minimal level. The last exam in AI in my master's degree I passed with a record low grade for myself - a 41 .
But I'm not ashamed of it, because even so, barely making it, I made it into the top 1/7 of the students and received a scholarship.
The subject I'm talking about now is called Prasību inženierija, meaning Requirements Engineering. It deals with gathering and analyzing information from a software project client in order to develop fairly strict criteria for each element of the final product, known as software requirements.
Over the course of the year we were mastering various approaches to gathering requirements and theoretically we had to do 11 lab assignments. I did nine, which is actually quite good, since the majority did two or three. And here begins the most interesting part. Theoretically, based on the results of these assignments, almost 4 extra points get added to my exam score. So even if I pass the exam horribly, the labs will pull me through. As it turned out, it was very naive to think so. The result of the practical assignments is added to the exam result only if the exam is passed with a grade of 5 and higher! It turns out, if I pass the exam with a 4, I will just stay with this bad grade. But if with a 5 - I'll immediately get a final 8 or 9. There's a certain twisted logic to this, but it's pretty strange. It would still be understandable if they just sent you packing with a failing grade (1, 2, or 3). But apparently, such a sadistic setup is much more sophisticated and interesting.
The exam itself felt like an execution: