Examinations Result Release

I just got back my results yesterday and all I have to say is that I have dropped from first class honors to third class, with the two modules that I skipped 60% of my tutorial classes getting Cs. My grades in this semester totally portray the importance of attendance in Universities. My Investments and Communication modules got A- and these are the only modules where I didn’t skip any tutorials. For accounting which I skipped two tutorials, I got B-. For my Consumer Behavior and Mathematical Methods for Finance where I skipped almost all tutorials, I got C+ and C respectively. Therefore, as you can see, my results and attendance is directly proportionate.

To be honest, I’m quite frustrated with my Investment module because I could have gotten a better grade for it, aside for the fact that I didn’t read the textbook fully and embarrassingly did not know what a forward is. As it turns out, a 25 marks question revolves around put-call-forward parity and I didn’t  know how to do it. As for my Communication module, I didn’t skip any lesson because I like the tutor a lot. She’s just so friendly and approachable.

Honestly, I don’t know why my managerial accounting got only B-, but I would guess it’s more on the coursework side, unless I made careless mistakes all over my examination script, since I’m pretty confident with it. As for the two other modules that got Cs, what can I say? For my coursework, I got D for one module and the other is unknown. It probably got a D too. They have a good reason to give me Ds, since I skipped almost all my tutorials and did not even bother submitting holiday assignments. It’s quite a miracle that I passed the two modules. If I faithfully attended all lessons, it seems like achieving As is quite easy, since coursework accounts for 50%.

Finally, there is another ungraded Human Resource module that I took and passed it. My experience with this module is totally amazing, since I have never attended a single lecture and when I took the first quiz, I only knew about the quiz 15 minutes before it started. I studied for 15 minutes and scored better than class average. In my second quiz, I spent about 45 minutes studying and for my exam, I spent 1 hour 15 minutes to revise everything I read in the lecture notes. Amazingly, I passed and in fact, I think I did pretty well in the paper. Taking into account 15 minutes for taking each of the quizzes and 1 hour which I spent on the exam, I spent just 3 hours and 45 minutes to pass a module!

Well… it’s nothing to be proud of really, since I pretty much fell from the skies by having such a great fall from first class to third. Well… I did say that I will do well in my first year, since I wanted to get into Dean’s list for at least a year. It seems like after achieving my goal, I don’t even have the motivation to attend classes, which explains the bad coursework gradings. It just proves a very important point that attending tutorials is very important if you want to score good grades. No matter how well you do in exams and tests, if you skip lessons habitually, your grades are not going to look pleasing.

Anyway, if I had spent the time I skipped classes to achieve something great out of academics, I would still have been proud of myself that I pass all modules despite not spending much time on them. However, I have wasted all my time in the last six months without achieving much in the non-academic world that I’m seriously ashamed of the way I lead my life in the later half of 2007.

Anyway, I have decided not to quit playing computer games in 2008. When I was not playing computer games at all, I sleep more than 10 hours everyday and still felt lethargic, so I was pretty much sleeping my way and wasting my time. This Christmas season, I decided to play an online game just for that event and I find that a moderation of computer games actually help me to develop good sleeping habits, while I read books and play games at the same time, since there are many activities in online games that don’t require active control. Besides, I find it too limiting to avoid playing games totally.

For my trading activities, they have temporary been halted as I write a program to backtest the market. The reason is the lack of confidence in a trading system if I do not test it and I don’t even know if it works. I have actually come up with a few systems to test, mainly revolving around moving averages, pivot points and fibonacci numbers. In my first system test of just moving average crossovers, the system is not able to win enough to offset commissions. Well… I sort of expected it before I tested but I just had to make sure.

My days of clicking on a mouse to make meaningless trades are over and I need to commit to coming up with a real system. If I can’t come up with a good one, I won’t be trading until I can. With that in mind, I look forward to a really great year ahead in 2008. I wish the same for you too.