Well that was an emotional and long day........
Third OU exam, third venue, found it easily enough, but the lunch time traffic was a bit of a nightmare and when I got there I didn't recognise anyone so I wondered if I was in the right place, but luckily my name was on the board, so all good so far, I'd found the venue.
The exam was in three sections, first part was 4 short questions from 10 - seemed to be 2 from each part of the course. I had pretty much decided on going for questions from Parts 2, 3 & 5 and in being pretty wed to this strategy I may have passed up some easier questions from Part 1.
Anyway, 3 of the 4 questions were pretty much bang on what I had expected, but the Apples and Hats comparative advantage question may have gone a bit astray. Apples were in tons total output, Hats were per person per year, so an anomolly here..... However in getting to the absolute advantage calculation I was dividing (if I remember this correctly) 200 by 30,000 to get a very odd 2/3 divided by 100 - a mixture of fractions and decimals that ended up as 0.0067 ? This does not seem difficult now but in the high stress environment of the exam I nearly asked the chap on the next row who looked equally perplexed with his maths exam paper if I could borrow his calculator. But no, I continued to carry out arithmetic functions on a mixture of very large and very small numbers, some decimal, some a variety of fractions ( I think there was a vulgar fraction employed at one point), in the hope it would all come good - it didn't.
At this point you start to doubt your ability to count, to apply reason, to understand the question, but for some inexplicable reason I blundered on. They only wanted to know who had absolute and comparative advantage on two products, so only 4 answers required which were either A or B. so I may have none, some or all right, but whoever marks it is going to wonder how on earth I came the conclusions I did without the aid of a mystic, some chicken bones and a prayer mat.
The next part was the bigger essays with 1 to be chosen from 4 questions on Book 1 macro. Two of the questions were on the inflation targeting model, so pretty much what I wanted. I can't remember what the other questions were.
The last part, 1 question from 4 on Book 2 micro. The questions were not as expected. I should have stuck to revising Part 4, one question was fairly simple on price ceiling, and I should have done that, the other was pretty much a carbon copy of a question in the example exam.... doh! it could all have been so much simpler.
The two from Part 5 were oddly worded and it's such a big subject I'm not actually sure if I answered the question. I obviously thought I did at the time, however with hindsight...... Oh well it is done now.
And that wasn't the end of today's trial, rush hour traffic on way home, took sodding hours, not sure why this exam centre was so far away from home, but I guess they only have so many places and you get what they can give you.
So, all-in-all I'm pretty confident of a pass, but I'm not too sure I'll get the high 70s I hoped for in an attempt and forlorn hope to be sucked up by the variable band boundaries to get a distinction, which is a shame as there was no lack of effort on my behalf to study for this and it may simply end up being about poor question choice - gutting!
Right, books away and life can get back to (ab)normal again, now where did I put that wife of mine, sure she's around here somewhere :-)
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