Well the exam has been and gone and I am pleased about that. It didn't help that on Tuesday I started to get a sore throat which turned into a cold on the day. There was no way I wasn't going to turn up for the exam even though I felt pretty rough in the morning and I hadn't slept that well the night before. In fact it may, in an odd way, have helped, since I stopped worrying about my performance and was just hoping for the best under difficult circumstances.
I took the same approach to this exam as I did for MS221; namely I started with question 1 and worked steadily through Part 1 in the order of the questions. I find this is a good technique. You slowly tick them off one by one, making sure that you get these easier questions well and truly nailed and then you get that growing confidence you can deal with the more difficult section later. My timings were good and I had over an hour left by the time I had finished the last question in Part 1 and I felt as if I hadn't made a mistake yet.
Part 2. An easy (but time consuming) symmetric groups question was an obvious first choice. Worked steadily through it and it was done without a hitch. Now the exam was nearly finished so I headed for my favourite topic in analysis, series - answering this question can be a pain, but it is straightforward. First part ok, second part "bing, bing, bing" something has gone wrong but I couldn't see what it was. I mistakenly thought I had used the wrong approach. Left it and completed the other two parts ok. Five minutes left. I went back to the second part but I couldn't see the problem, so I completed it anyway, saying what I knew to be wrong. Time up! How irritating. So close to being totally happy!
Afterwards I realised what I had done. I had dropped a factor of n3 and I hadn't seen it in time. Oh well. I thought it was a good paper as there weren't any nasty surprises. Before the exam I was reflecting on all the difficult things they could ask which hadn't been covered by my practise of recent papers but it didn't happen. I think the general consensus was that people were happy. I left with my tutor group and we went for a celebratory drink at Diggers and I had two medicinal malt whiskies to wash that cold away!
