I wrote my STAT 443 (forecasting) final exam last night… long story short, it didn’t go well. The whole exam was done on Maple TA, which is some online test application created by Maple. First of all, all the things I studied for were not worth a lot on the final. I thought the final would be roughly the same as all our assignments and the midterm — which was mainly identifying, estimating and verifying models for different datasets. BUT, the final exam had a lot of questions on theory, which I didn’t study for in great details. There were also a lot of true and false questions, and some of those I wasn’t sure about because I don’t think there was any mention of them in the lecture notes. For example, one question stated “the Dickey-Fuller test is always conclusive (T/F)”… I’ve used the DF test, but I don’t know if it’s ALWAYS conclusive, so I put true because I haven’t come across a case where I’ve ignored the result yet, not like the Shapiro-Wilk test for normality.
And with about an hour left on the exam, the computers started to reboot. Some stupid Windows update thing forced everyone to reboot. And it took about 30 mins for everyone to reboot and login again. The server was being flood by all the STAT 443 students and couldn’t handle the load. So the exam was extended by 30 mins…. not like it really helped anyway, I was pretty much done by the time the computers started rebooting, but I stayed a while longer to try and figure out some of the questions I didn’t get. All in all, it was a pretty crappy way to kick off the finals.
