First Million Challenge Homepage

Release of My Examination Results

Blogged By: Low Hang Wei @ June 5th, 2008 - 8:17 pm

Once again, I got my results and as always, I am posting them on this blog, whether the results are good or poor. As a summary, my results in this semester are of first class standard, but barely there. It’s a sharp contrast to my previous semester’s results, where that single semester totally ruined all chances of me getting first class honors ever. I feel pretty satisfied with my results, but saddened at the same time. Let me explain why…

For the amount of effort that I have put in, my results are considered to be simply unbelievable. # Bragging alert ahead, it is advisable to skip this paragraph # I skip almost all my lessons, study for 2 to 4 hours per paper and still scores almost all As. I am seriously proud of myself simply because I am supposedly taking all the difficult third year modules when I’m only a year 2 student. I’m really glad that although I wasn’t born smart, I learnt to become more intelligent with time.

Some people think that I’m a hypocrite though, thinking that I don’t study in front of people and hide alone to study all day for good grades. To these people, I feel that it’s quite a shame because they don’t bother finding out what makes a person study much lesser and can still score. Instead, they spend their precious time second-guessing people, never bothering to study much smarter.

Anyway, I’m leading to my main point in this post. Some people don’t know what they don’t know. Accelerated learning has been in existence for ages, but the number of people who embrace it is far and few. For example, I told one of my friends about how to enter into an accelerated learning mode by doing something pretty silly. It was simply brushed aside, because to her, it may seem like I was trying to play a fool or that I was crazy. Some people just cannot accept what seems illogical, but often, our subconscious mind is truly amazing and we should learn to trust our subconscious mind.

Before saying that something is rubbish and doesn’t work, maybe think about how nice it would be if a particular technique of studying work. I have to admit that I don’t enter into accelerated studying mode all the time, since there are times where the feeling is not there and somehow I feel that my unconscious mind won’t be able to absorb. However, I have to say that I have grown very dependent on study strategies, rather than spending time. For one, I am a person who can work hard, but cannot spend time to study hard. If I depended on reading word by word, I may have been unable to pass my papers.

Two nights before each of my exam papers, my wife may catch me spending 5 minutes flipping a book so fast that it is impossible to read even a sentence. I will then go ahead and sleep, telling my wife that I finished studying… she obviously thinks I’m joking. Honestly, I purposely said that in a jokingly manner so she doesn’t think I’m crazy, but I am actually telling my subconscious mind that I have finished reading. Somehow, I believe my subconscious mind has processed the information, but my conscious mind is of course not yet aware of that. The day after the night, I will then read the book consciously and most of the time, I will finish reading the whole textbook in two to four hours. * Note that my conscious reading speed is not fast at all.

I just wrote the above as a courtesy to people who genuinely want to know how I study effectively. I honestly believe that studying should be easy. There are some other lame stuff that I do before and after studying, before and doing a paper, but it’s too long to cover them in a blog, so I will continue with my original ranting. I was saying that I was saddened, because it feels sad to think back that all my semesters have performed well and worthy of me getting first class. However, thinking of just that one semester where my GPA is only 3 and drag down all my other semesters, it is indeed saddening to see my first class fly away.

Initially, I thought I was prepared to give up my first class honors and that’s why I went ahead and spend almost all my time working. Fate has it that you only regret after losing something and that’s how I will regret losing my first class honors because of a single semester. If I had only bothered to spend time attending lessons where the class participation matters a lot, I would still be on track to first class. Not to mention the fact that I did not gain anything meaningful by giving up my first class honors.

On the other hand, I just hope that losing my first class will push me harder. Although I don’t really believe in spending too much time on studying, I do believe in spending an outrageous amount of time on working. Looking ahead, I need to spend more time on the development of a webby for a business venture with my friends and there’s quite a lot of programming to do. There’s no room to slack since the deadlines I set for myself is pretty tight. Whether the venture will be a success is an unknown, but at least… it’s something worth spending effort to find out.

P.S: Almost forgot to post my results for public scrutiny :)

Research Methods A-
Strategic Management B-
Equity Securities A
Treasury & Risk Management A+
Portfolio Management A+
Financial Modeling A-

Blogged Under: My Personal Life, Random Thoughts

More Posts

« My National Service LifeShowing Appreciation To Your Professors »


3 Responses to “Release of My Examination Results”

  1. 1
    debt consolidation unsecured Says:
    June 8th, 2008 at 12:23 pm

    I think posting your examinations results help you evaluate your own performance, congratulations and keep up the good job!

  2. 2
    Qin Says:
    June 8th, 2008 at 1:28 pm

    are you sure u weren’t born smart? in poly u also dun study much…at least i believe u dun :)

    will try to keep ur method of revising in mind, will try.

    one more thing i realise in this sem….must strongly believe you will get A also……… it works :) (with hard work also lah)

    interested in all the other things u do before n after u study sia….can share? i wanna be more efficient in study…cos i kept zzzzzzzzz whenever i read ~~

    Hang Wei says:
    I can assure you that I wasn’t born smart, maybe average at best. In my PSLE, my results were mediocre and I went on to Secondary School, which I consistently stayed in the bottom 10% of the cohort. If I was born smart, why was I such a consistent under-performer? In fact, I tried to pick up HTML when I was in my early 14, but I just couldn’t pick it up and HTML for dummies seem not as dummy proof as I expected. I still remember this, because it was the first time I tried to pick up a skill on my own, which I failed miserably.

    However, you only got to know me a few years later where numerous events took place and may have a different perception about me. Anyway, if you meant studying hard in terms of reading official textbooks from Poly, then you’re right, I don’t really read my Poly textbooks and almost all of them are intact. However, I did read a hell lot of other books at that point of time. In my poly first year, I probably read more books than what some people read in a decade. In one of my past posts, I stated that Intelligence is a result of past diligence, so that could have been the factor that made me grow.

    Like you, I used to be unable to read textbooks, because I fall asleep in the first fifteen minutes almost with a 100% accuracy. However, honestly, both of us know at some part that it’s not that we cannot read, but rather we don’t feel enough reason to. It may be due to the fact that we think that the pain of reading is greater than the joy of doing well in exams, so our subconscious automatically give us a syndrome of falling asleep when we read. In psychology terms, it’s called a secondary gain. To make it easier for you to read, there are two ways of doing it: amplifying the joy from doing well or reducing the pain from reading. Everything you do to help you read easier is a subset of these two.

    For example, you stated that believing you can do well helps. The reason is simply due to the Expectancy theory, because if you believe that you can do well if you study, you will naturally feel that it’s worthwhile for you to spend some effort studying. On the other hand, if you believe that studying more will not get you better results, your subconscious may simply discharge studying as a time-wasting event. Similarly, on the actual day of exam, simply believing that you can do well may activate your subconscious mind to do wonders, since it foresees a future pain if you don’t do well when you expected it.

    Of course, a lot of it is pretty much theory and hypothesis about how our mind works, but no one really knows how our mind works. It’s reasonable if some people don’t believe it, because it may not be true. Therefore, I personally think that the most important thing when choosing something to believe is not whether it’s logical, but whether believing in something will help make your life better. Anyway, since you are interested in what I do before and after studying, or before the actual paper, I will state some things I do, which I have to clarify first that I don’t know if they are working against me or working with me.

    - Imagining something at a certain location behind my head
    - Flipping books at speeds that I can’t read even a single sentence
    - Telling myself that I am only interested to read what I need for my examinations
    - Imagining information flow from the book to my head after reading
    - Imagining myself doing well for the examinations and what I am going to do after that

    I am not a master of NLP yet, so maybe someone who knows NLP at a higher level than myself will be a better person to give advice. I seriously hope such a person would stumble upon this blog and offer some golden advice, which will benefit everyone reading my blog. :) Anyway, for your information, I did not do any of the things above in the semester that I screwed up really badly. I skipped so many lessons and pissed some of my tutors off so much that I strongly believe that there is no way that I can do well. So, it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy after all.

  3. 3
    Qin Says:
    June 8th, 2008 at 3:19 pm

    you are right, i kept reminding myself that if i dun score for tat particular mod i will regret later, so sorta push me to work harder. (but then…still not as hard working as many in uni lah…haha..afterall i am not a mugger from young)

    mm..those things u do i think i understand why, that is more of condiitoning both ur mind n sub conscious to take in information. Will try it next sem ^_^

    i ever read somewhere …. meditating (or is it dazing / random thoughts…forgot) few mins before lecture will help absorbing, u tried before?

    mm….i still trying hard not to sleep in lecture / revision … hhaa

    btw dun be too “zai yi” over ur screw up sem, well at least u learn sth from it i believe. Since is alreay a mistake, then made full use of it :) (i still learning this also lah..hee)

    Hang Wei says:
    I don’t know about the dazing part, since I don’t attend lectures anyway. If I have to put it, I used to attend lectures in my first year and I slept through almost all of them, but there are many times where I still take in certain key points. I strongly believe that the subconscious mind takes in information at a much faster pace, but whether your conscious mind accepts the communication with his other half is a different story. The more often you use your subconscious, the more it will gradually talk to you.

    Personally, my mastery with the subconscious mind is not very strong and I am still developing the capability to engage in Lucid Dreaming, which is the art to not just remember your dreams, but be in control of your dreams. It has not been very successful after one year, but at least I can remember most of my dreams now :)

Leave a Reply


Get Notified of New Posts!
Get 'First Million Challenge' updates sent to your email. Just enter your email addy:

Delivered by FeedBurner