Going to Fail M338

Well tomorrow is M338 exam day. I feel that I deserve to fail and I probably will. Still I'll turn up and see what happens. OK what went wrong. I basically switched off. I thought I might be able to salvage something by concentrating on Block B, But the exam questions seem to bear little or no resemblance to what is in the course material or if it does then there are very little guidelines as to what one is supposed to do, OK so a typical question will ask us to subdivide a solid with twists and deduce it's characteristic equations and say its boundary number. In order to calculate the Euler characteristic one must work out the number of vertices the number of edges and the number of face. The first two are relatively straightforward but the last one seems to defy all sorts of logic. Again there is normally a question on embeding a network within a rectangle representing say a torus or a projective plane but again  the course material gives no general guidance as to how this can be done apart from here is the diagram and here is the embedding. Fine I'll leave it to those who can intuitively understand what is going on for me it just leaves me baffled. Again in the second part there is usually a question relating the forms of surface described in connected sum form  to another descriprtion in connected sum form . Again little or no guidance has been given as to how to tackle this type of question.

My banker questions from part 2 will be deducing the form of a solid from vertex insertions and possibly one on Metric spaces and whether or not sequences defined on the metric space are Cauchy. But the examples apart from the one in 2010 are such that one has to really think on ones feet as to what the metric really means.

So I should get more or less full marks for one long question in part 2 that is say 14 marks. There are two possibly 3 part 1 questions I can get more or less full marks for thats 24 marks then I'll be really stretched to get more. I could aim to delibrately fail in the hope of getting a resit next year but there seems to be some ambiguity as to if I did that I would only qualify for a straight pass. So I might just scrape a pass but anything more I wont deserve. Fortunately I don't have to count this course for anything for my second open degree so it's best quietly dropped whatever the grade whilst I include other stuff.

Good luck to those who have got more out of this course than I have. But I never really got in to it and so deserve to fail.