So activity lately has tapered off. I spent about 70 hours of my PTO (paid time off) at work on campus studying for exams. The class I just finished was Machine Learning by Dr. Vincent Ng. We had a second midterm, the final, and the qualification exam all a week apart in the last 3 weeks.

So I did alright on the midterm and the final. Unfortunately, I didn’t do as well as I think I could have though. There were several questions that were easy and I either made a simple mistake or misunderstood what was being asked. In the end I finished right in the middle of the class, giving me a B. I think I could have had an A if I had performed slightly better on the final though. The class was difficult to say the least. I spent an average of 10 or so hours a week for this single class. We had biweekly homework assignments, all of which had a programming segment (usually entailed implementing the covered algorithms). The professor I took the course with was not

Because I ended up in the middle, most of the people that beat me were the PhD students. Those same students were more likely to be signed up for the qualification exam. After studying for 3 days, I spoke with the professor and he told me I was ranked near the bottom compared with the other students, which meant I was more likely to get a FAIL on the qualifier.

That’s the other thing; in between the second midterm and the final exam, the department head sent out an email informing everyone that they were officially changing the QE policy. Now, a student only needs 3 PASS grades on the QE instead of 5 and the student may take any exam from any track/focus. Before, I had to take all 5 from the Intelligent Systems track. Also, the tests changed to a PASS/FAIL grading scheme, which meant my two previous MARGINALs were wiped from my record, as if I had never taken them.

After speaking with my professor, I decided that taking the second most difficult exam offered by the Computer Science department was not the best strategy. If I failed it, then I would have 1 more shot to get a pass and I couldn’t switch to a different exam. I really would rather take an exam that is somewhat easier. I’m not a fan of the whole end-of-course exam policy to determine who can do research anyways, so it’s really best to just go with the strategy that will most likely result in an overall PASS.

Christmas vacation is coming up, but I am on call for work so I’ll likely have to work several of those days. I will however spend some time trying to update my blog. The author of the NextGen gallery will be releasing a new version with EXIF/IPTC support with automatic tagging, which I will definately install immediately. I also need to update WordPress and switch to the new tag-based system. I’ll post my year-end goals later this weekend.