As far as the last test is concerned, I'm hoping for a...grades shift. I took a look at the correctness slides before the test, but because we didn't have a tutorial or any assignment questions related to recursive correctness, I wasn't anticipating 50% of our test to be based on it. I completed the question as best I could, though I won't be surprised at a failing grade. Also, the final question - I don't really understand why it was worth four marks. I had never seen a question like that before, and though I almost got the right answer (I put the power of 2 in the wrong place), I don't know how we would have shown our work for it? A few students wrote down a solution where they used a temporary variable, but I had never seen anything like that before in programming (reducing a recursive call in that way) and there was no way I could have come up with such a thing. I understand how a solution like that would have merited four marks, but that isn't something we could have studied. Most of the things I did study, however, didn't appear on the test at all, including coming up with a closed form, proving the closed form by induction, and doing upper and lower bounds. I feel like I really wasted a lot of time going over old tutorials and the assignment - the only thing I recognized on the test was the Master Theorem, but that really wasn't something that required a lot of studying.

Anyway, I was so tired and distressed after the test that I didn't really pay attention to what was going on in lecture. The annotated slides from last week aren't up yet, so I'll have to read through the course notes carefully. I'm looking at sections 7.1 and 7.3 - it looks like we'll be using structural induction quite a bit, which is something I haven't had any practice with whatsoever. I'm in the evening section, it was the morning section that had it on their first test, and we haven't seen it in assignments nor in tutorials, so I'm glad I'll be able to understand it better with these new applications now.

It looks like we're not doing any tutorials on correctness? That's a shame, because that was something I felt I had a really good grasp on in CSC165, but with all of these new elements added onto it this year, I would really like to be able to get some practice on it, especially for iterative programs. I hope, then, that it will either be on the assignment, or that the exam won't have any big questions on proofs of correctness, just to balance out that horrible test.