An Open Challenge
On Thursday January 28, while I was in the act of a grueling 25 min walk through the heavy Tundra-like blizzard blowing viciously against my unguarded face, on my way from my apartment on Keats Way & University to my 8:30 AM lab in Chemistry-2, an interesting realization struck me. And that realization was so profound it gave me a surge of motivation that allowed me to trudge forward through the snow, one footstep at a time. I had come to terms with what Waterloo Engineering had done to me. And what it had done to me could not possibly be undone no matter how hard I tried. I had been annealed, strengthened, and hardened in ways I had never thought possible just 5 years ago.
Each year, thousands of to-be high school graduates try to decide which university they should go to. And every time preparation for post-university life was their most important criterion, I have whole-heartedly recommended Waterloo engineering to them. A lot of high school students are under the impression that if they can get through University, they should be fine after that. But there are really easy ways to get through University. And then, there are really hard ways to get through University.
What I'm proposing is that you pick the latter and take the tougher route. As one of my greatest mentors taught me many years ago, given all things equal, you should always take the harder and untrodden path whenever possible. The treasure chest, if one exists, is more likely to exist in an untrodden path, for if it existed in a trodden path, it is likely to have been pocketed by now.
When times are tough, the ones that are the most prepared, the ones who made it hard for themselves when they didn't have to, will be years ahead of those that got through University with the least amount of effort. This is because those who are prepared will already be pre-equipped with all the machinery needed to deal with the challenges of the future.
You want to treat university as a training ground. A place where you can learn all the skills you need in 5 years to succeed for the next 40 years of your life. If you don't extract every ounce of juice out of University, someone else will, and they'll be sure to beat you at it.
So if you are a grade 12 student and have received your acceptance letter into the University of Waterloo, I suggest you trash the passive approach of coasting through University by handling the sequence of requirements, one at a time. Instead, take a more active approach of challenging yourself as much as you can. Then after 5 years, when your training is finally complete, virtually everything you do will have a "been-there-done-that" feel to it, while everyone else will be scrambling to learn all these new skills they should have learned in University already.
To that effect, I propose the following open challenge to any high-school student who would like to attempt it. This challenge isn't for the faint-hearted. It will require significant levels of determination, perseverance, courage, and discipline to carefully plan and flawlessly execute. The requirements of the challenge are as follows:
You must be officially enrolled at the University of Waterloo as an engineering student in one of these six well-known to be hard disciplines: electrical, computer, mechatronics, software, systems, or nano. There are quite possibly other disciplines that are just as hard, or even harder, but I possess sufficient evidence only for these six. The work load requirements of these disciplines should be enough to teach you all the time-management skills you'll ever need.
The reason I pick engineering over other faculties is because this is the only faculty that makes co-op mandatory which automatically makes work term reports mandatory. The work term report requirements for the above engineering programs are a lot more rigorous. Furthermore, PDENG, at least in its current incarnation, seems a lot more annoying than PDMATH. The mandatory labs, pre-labs and lab reports can all get quite tedious. CSE requirements are a pain to fulfill. To make matters more interesting, the above six disciplines also have fairly rigorous requirements for their 4th year capstone/design project. Finally, the Faculty of Engineering is the only faculty that allows students to take extra courses for free.
The reason I pick the University of Waterloo is because I have spent nearly five years here. This place has a harsh-enough Winter capable of sucking the soul out of you, especially if you've never experienced it before. No matter what engineering program you pick, you will have to spend at least 2 winters here. So gear up.
Furthermore, Waterloo has a spine chilling prison-like feeling at times. This place can get quite depressing, stressful, painful, scary, and if you can deal with all that, I am sure you will find almost every other place in North America a paradise. You will develop excellent stress-management skills. You will also learn how to take advantage of everything around you to keep you calm and composed without breaking. This includes great music, healthy relationships and friendships, and smart mentors.
You must be an out-of-province student. The farther away from Ontario you're from, the better. Extra points if you're an international student with no relatives in Ontario. Metaphorically speaking, you will be parachuted into the university, and you will know not a single person around you within a 100-mile radius. You will have 0 friends to rely on, and 0 shoulders to lean on. You will have 0 families and 0 relatives whose homes you can go to in the weekends. You will start from scratch on a fresh slate, man-vs-wild style.
You must complete all 6 co-op work terms even though the requirement is only 5. These jobs can be obtained in any manner possible, using Jobmine or not. However, each of your co-op terms must be in a city outside of both KW and your hometown, ideally somewhere that requires you to take a plane from either of these places. Also, you will have at least one well-paying full-time job offer before you graduate.
You must not fail any of your PDENG courses even once. This constraint forces you to turn PDENG into an optimization problem, instead of an easier hit-and-miss one.
You should pay for your tuition and living expenses yourself. Loans are acceptable, but you will pay them back when you make that money back during co-op terms. Your parents only give you a laptop and some clothes for free before you depart your home city. When you graduate, you should have a net positive income in your bank account. If you are paying international fees, you will pay back what a local student would've paid. These constraints force you to find jobs that are the most well-paying, to excel at your interviews, to be fiercely smarter than your classmates, to live frugally during your study and work terms, and to manage a tight budget.
You will take a minimum of 10 extra courses above and beyond your usual engineering work load for credit to master advanced time-management skills. These extra courses must come in the form of options or minors (like economics) which force you to plan your academics well in advance. Try to take at least one of these extra courses at the 300 or 400 level with a course code of CO, PMATH, or CS. None of these extra courses should be taken during your work terms. You may attempt to, but you'll be wasting money that way, which may make it harder for you to stay net positive. And of course, you are not allowed to fail even a single course you take or withdraw from any course after the no-penalty drop period. In taking all these extra courses, you will have learned to exploit technology to its fullest, and you will become a pro at scheduling and triaging.
Out of these minimum 10 extra courses, one of them will be taken not for credit. You will not enroll in this class, but will simply attend all lectures and complete all assignments. CS courses are particularly well-suited to this. Try and take a course that will teach you a lot just by attending lectures. So ensure the prof is a good lecturer. In completing this challenge, you will learn a skill that only a handful of students will ever learn.
Oh, and did I mention you need to maintain a cumulative average of 80%+? You want it to be high anyway otherwise the highest-paying employers are not going to interview you. And keep that job offer you get; you'll probably be taking it since your GPA will be much lower than that of your classmates to apply to grad school because of all the extra courses. And besides, no decent grad school will take you without prior research experience. Well, they might. So consider doing URAs during a few of your study terms.
Finally, you must graduate successfully and come out of all this with no addictions whatsoever: coffee, tea, caffeine, pop, alcohol, chocolate, sugar, drugs, or nicotine. You may consume these stimulants occasionally, but if I took these away from you for a week, you should still be able to perform at a decent level.
The last rule is that you must not tell anyone you are part of this challenge except for other people who are also attempting (or have attempted) the same challenge. The first rule of fight club is, of course, to not talk about fight club.
And then what? Once you have completed this intense 5-year challenge, you will have obtained all the necessary skills to deal with most, if not all, realities of life: pressure, stress, incompetence, bureaucracy, inflexibility, and many more — all vital skills very-much needed in the real world today. Most importantly, you will have learned so much about yourself, your strengths, and your capabilities that this knowledge will in itself become invaluable in every single future life decision.
Here's to the best Grade 12 students. Let the force and Suhosin be with you.
You'll be needing it.
Pull Versus Push
I've never been a fan of push-based knowledge systems. Think about it. You go to a lecture. The prof regurgitates a bunch of "knowledge" you may not care about one bit. You then take 30% of that "knowledge" home, unsure of what to do with it. Congratulations, you are now the 7 billionth victim of a crappy push-based education system.
I've always been a fan of pull-based knowledge systems. It's a system where you wander around a topic on your own, guided by your own interests. Ever wondered why we're so effective at our hobbies and the things we teach ourself, yet so crappy at our jobs? Our jobs were taught to us, while our hobbies were taught by us.
I once had an epiphany. In it, I was the world's best lecturer. Essentially, a present-day Socrates. However, my lecture halls would contain only 3 students tops, usually just one. And even though I was the best lecturer the world had ever seen, I could never be caught lecturing. The world's best lecturer never lectures, what?
Instead, I would sit silent in my chair and wait for my students to ask me questions. And when they did, I would answer them as briefly as I could, usually in a sentence or two. If they wanted more detail, they'd have to ask me more questions. Then I would give them a bit more detail, but only a bit more. After a few iterations of this, the students would smarten up. They would realize that the better their questions were, the more they could squeeze out of me. So they would often take an entire minute or two to craft their questions. Each question had to be like a needle in an acupuncture therapy: sharp, and to the point.
Since the students would spend so long thinking about their questions, they would often obtain answers to most of their questions on their own using their own heads, eliminating the need to pose the question to me in the first place.
This process would carry on for hours until my students were happy with the knowledge they had gained that day. This epiphany was my first voyage into the beautiful world of pull-based knowledge systems. In fact, we use this kind of pull-based knowledge system almost everyday: the students are none other than common people like us, and the best lecturer in the world is none other than Google. Every Python, Ruby and PHP programmer who has done quick Google lookups in the middle of an in-depth programming session knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Forcing knowledge on to other people without them asking for it is perhaps the worst thing you could possibly do to them, besides maybe murdering them. If you're knowledgeable about a topic, it's okay to let people know that, but don't start lecturing on it to every single person you meet. If people want help with your expert opinion, they will come find you.
The same is true for this very blog and this very blog post in particular. I might have made it easy for you to get to this post by publishing to your news feeds, but you still had to click to get here. And you still have to put in the effort of reading what's being described here. And if you're not interested in what I have to say once you click, you can read just the paragraphs that interest you while skimming or skipping the rest, or you could just close the tab and move on with life. You're in control here, not me.
You can't do that if I catch you in person and start lecturing you about the topics I am most interested in. I'd simply bore you to death. You could walk away, but you probably won't do that in an effort to be courteous. The internet allows you to walk away from anything that doesn't interest you without hurting anyone's feelings. Pull-based systems are as beautiful as they can get: you ask for the information, and I give it to you; I publish what I have to say, and you subscribe only if you're interested. No force, no pressure.
Two weeks ago, my friend Sarah shared this youtube video where Peyton Manning describes how it was precisely a pull-based system that made him good at what he does. Had his father Archie Manning tried to push football skills on to his son, the results could've ended up being quite disastrous.
Giving without someone asking is something I strongly try to stay away from. Especially when it comes to advice and help. The reason sometimes even good advice is so poorly regarded is because it is given without anyone asking for it. Same goes for help. I never help anyone unless they've explicitly asked me for it. And the people who receive my help after they've requested it seem more satisfied with it. My gut feeling is that in 99% of the cases, most people don't want my advice or help. Thrusting help or advice upon them is actually quite a painful thing to endure from the recipient's point of view.
My dad may be a pretty good tax planning accountant, but imagine if he lectured every person he met on tax planning. He'd have 0 friends by now. It is precisely because he withholds his accumulated knowledge and delivers them only upon request that makes him in demand. Elementary ECON 101 at its simplest.
The reason why the Socratic method is so effective is precisely because it is as far away from a push-based system as one can possibly hope for. Had Socrates been a university lecturer instead of an inquisitor, Plato would have been fast asleep by now. But the Socratic method isn't a true pull-based system either. It's not Plato who asks the questions in a Socratic dialogue, it's Socrates!
Pull-based knowledge systems are perhaps the next revolution in modern next-generation education systems. The smartest of the smartest, the true thinkers, the modern intellectual revolutionaries and mathematicians, the star athletes of our times, the ace politicians and foreign policy advisors, the next breed of Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry and economics — all of them are going to be educated and trained using pull-based knowledge transfer systems for education, training, reinforcement, inspiration and advice, not push-based.
If you are the victim or perpetrator of a push-based knowledge system, it is time you start asking yourself the right questions.
A Free Waterloo Degree
The question I've always hated the most is "if you were to do it all again, what would you do differently?" The reason I hate it so much is because in hindsight, everything seems possible. In hindsight, all your mistakes seem predictable and avoidable. But only in hindsight. Hindsight is always 20/20. Forethoughts seldom are.
A better question to ask is: "what's the best way to detect that you're about to make the same mistake you've made once before already?" Sounds like a minority report of sorts, but this question at least has some usefulness to it.
But yesterday, as I was walking from the math building to the physics building which is where I have all my classes this term, something very profound struck me as I was wondering how I'd do things differently. And it's that Waterloo allows you to get a free Waterloo "degree" without you paying them a single cent.
Think about it for a moment. Being a formally registered student doesn't really benefit you that much. Let's see how we might take advantage of this.
Here's how a rough game plan might look.
You arrive at Waterloo in September after obtaining your free Grade 12 degree in June. But 3 months before you arrive, you'll have found a fairly close place to live in off-campus because you won't be allowed to live on campus. It'll need to be fairly close since you won't be able to bus for free. So something on Philip, Sunview, Lester, Westmount or Keats Way should work pretty well. The rent for a decent room on these streets should be around $450-$500 per month. If you already live in Kitchener/Waterloo, you're better off just buying the monthly bus pass and pitching camp at your parents'.
Once you arrive, you then use the most widely used online tool on campus known as the UW Schedule of Classes (SOC) to plan out a schedule for yourself based on the courses you're interested in. For the first two terms, you can probably copy the courses from your favorite academic plan. All these plans are available online without login. For example, a list of courses for nano engineering can be found here.
Because you won't have a calendar built automatically for you the way people with Quest access have, you'll need to use an online tool like the UW Schedule Generator by James, or a more sophisticated app like Outlook or Google Calendar to build one for yourself.
Once you know what classes you want to take, you go to class everyday at the scheduled time. Everyone else is going to assume you're a formally registered student. There's no way they're going to know you're not unless you tell them. You now have access to an unlimited quantity of free lectures. This is a rough sketch of the plan. Let's now try to address some of the problems we may encounter.
If you need textbooks, you can buy them at the UW bookstore. You don't need to be registered to buy books. But that would be stupid since books at UW bookstore are heavily over-priced. You're better off buying used international editions off abebooks.com or something similar.
You can't use the used bookstore since you need a watcard to do that. But you can find people who are taking your next term's courses this term (using SOC again) by approaching them towards the end of the term, and buying the book off them directly at a subsidized price. It saves them the effort of having to drop off their book at the used bookstore and wait until it's sold and then go back again to pick up their cheque. You can also buy bound course notes from Graphics/PixelPlanet without a watcard, so you're clear there.
Sure, you can't check out books at the library. That might suck a bit. But if you're motivated enough, you can read all the books you want at the library itself, or you could find one or more friends from your classes who are willing to check out books for you. If you use the free library internet connection at DP/DC, you also have free unlimited access to all the top journals without a library card.
Sure, you won't have meal plans and subsequent discounts when you eat on-campus. But on-campus food sucks anyway, and everyone knows the "discount" they give you isn't really a discount: they've already deducted some money at the start of the term.
You'll definitely need a printer since you won't be allowed to print anywhere on-campus. Maybe one of your housemates will have one that you can mooch off in return for some money. Push comes to shove, there's always UW Graphics and also Kinkos down the street. Photocopying shouldn't be a problem since there's a few coin photocopiers around campus. UW Graphics will also do photocopying for you. Thankfully, UW graphics accepts cash, credit and debit cards too in addition to watcards.
Since you won't have access to Quest, you can't do advanced searches on courses to find out, for instance, all the CS courses that run on Mon, Wed, Fri from 2:30-3:30pm. You could probably write a UW SOC scraper and import it into a MySQL database or something to query it. Or you could find someone who's done the hard work for you already. Scott from uwlive.ca fame probably has that database without an exposed interface for it. Or you just need to find a registered friend who is willing to run the query on your behalf.
You won't be able to do any of the labs since lab groups are small and attendance will be taken. Save yourself the embarrassment of the instructor discovering you're not on the class roster. So wet labs and general science labs are out of the question. For CS/software labs, you'll usually need a NEXUS or UNIX account to login into, which you won't have. So you'll need to bring your own laptop. Or borrow your neighbor's credentials.
The worst part of not registering at UW is the lack of wireless access. If you're lucky, you might get a weak uw-guest signal, but that's only in very specific locations. But I'm sure you can find someone who is willing to trust you with their Quest password so long as you assure them you won't drop any of their courses half-way through the term. Find someone who doesn't care about their grades, or has incredibly good grades that hiding them from everyone is unnecessary. You could probably pay him $100 and talk him into it. Alternately, you could perhaps tether your laptop to your iPhone data plan or something. Or you could use something like MiFi, host your own personal wifi hotspot and charge other people for it.
You won't get an email address or email account. But UW email sucks anyways, so just use gmail, which is free. You won't have access to UW-ACE. This could be a slight problem. You'll need to get a friend to email you all the lecture slides and assignments periodically throughout the term. Or you'll need to get them off from him using a USB key periodically. However, with technologies like Dropbox, you just need to find someone in class who always downloads everything from a course into a particular folder (file packrats as the name goes), and get him to share that folder with you on Dropbox. This way, both yours and your friend's net extra work is virtually zero.
Even still, you won't receive the emails profs send through UW-ACE, and you can't send emails to all students in the class when you have an uncleared doubt. Not a major concern. If you have an uncleared doubt, just phone the prof or TA or ask them in person the next day. They have no idea you're not registered in the class, let alone in the University.
You won't be able to write midterms and finals because most profs take attendance and check for watcards. But there's still a lot of profs that don't do that, so feel free to crash the party, optionally in a chicken suit. If they suddenly start checking for watcards 10 minutes into the exam, pretend like you're abysmally sick with H1N1, walk out the exam hall with the question sheet, and go do the exam on your own time at home.
Since you won't have access to Jobmine, you'll need to find your own job. Bummer. But having good friends will help you a lot here. I know a number of non-co-op students in CS, like Paul, who do this already. In some sense, this whole idea of a free "degree" will work a lot better if you work towards a CS or software degree. At software job interviews, you can just tell the interviewers that you know x, y, and z, without proof. You can tell them that you've "taken" courses in x', y', and z'. After a few challenge questions, the interviewer should be reasonably convinced you know your stuff even though you had no proof of your knowledge. This trick is a lot easier to pull off with CS and software jobs than for any other type of job. I know this for a fact since that's how I secured not only all my co-op jobs so far, but also my full-time job.
With CS and software jobs, the interviewer is going to ask you challenge questions anyways. Just because you got 97% on distributed computing 2.5 years ago doesn't mean you know jack about distributed computing. Or even if you did know something, it doesn't mean you remember it 2.5 years later, and even if you remember something, it doesn't mean you know how to apply your knowledge to everyday practicality. So from the interviewer's stand point, it doesn't make a difference at all whether you took the course or not. All that he cares is if you know your stuff now, and if you can perform your job function efficiently, period. How you obtained that knowledge is (and should be) absolutely irrelevant.
If you don't get a co-op job, no big deal, just come back to school for another study term. It's not like you have to tell anyone or change academic streams. But if you do find a co-op job, you'll have to post your sublet only on Craigslist since the UW off-campus housing website requires Quest login to post sublets.
It's probably a lot easier to pull something like this off today than it was five years ago. And I can assure you it will be even easier a few years from now unless Waterloo sees this as a problem and does something concrete about it. This is one of those tricks that'll work as long as too many people don't start doing it to make it noticeable. Thankfully, doing this requires more work unlike getting an unpaid bus ride which takes less work (sneak in through the back door).
So the number of people successfully executing this plan will be somewhat capped due to the high levels of motivation required to go through with the plan. If this plan fails disastrously, no big deal. Just enroll at Waterloo like a regular student, and challenge all the courses you feel confident about by passing the final exam without taking the course formally for credit.
At the end of the day, you'll save some $50k (or more) in wasted tuition fees, co-op fees, endowment fees, student society fees, FEDS fees, FEDS administered fees, and student services fees. And what's better, you can skip all the wasteful parts of your degree like lab reports, work term reports, PD, PDENG, etc. that don't really teach you much for the amount of time put into it. The possibilities are endless: you're only limited by your own motivation, resourcefulness, and um, creativity.
Instead, use all this saved time to focus on the real meat. Finish your UW degree in only 5-6 semesters similar to what Steve Pavlina did. Overload yourself with 6-7 courses each term. And don't waste time running around campus getting approval for override forms when you have time conflicts or unit overloads. Since your only major costs should be housing, food, and other general living expenses, the faster you finish your degree, the less you have to pay for these day-to-day amenities.
The final nail on the coffin? It's something you should already know. Your undergraduate degree is only a piece of paper and means nothing to anyone, except perhaps to the people who know nothing about what you know, like your relatives and your parents. It gives you some supposed credibility, but after your first real job, it doesn't matter anymore; your results at your first job will count way more. It's for you to ask yourself if such a piece of paper and such vague claims of credibility is worth $50k to you.
If a smart, studious and serious Grade 12 student approached me today and told me he wanted to obtain a free Waterloo "degree", he can be assured he will have my full support in showing him how to weave through the many loop holes we've got. I'll agree to be the inside man if he can prove he has what it takes to pull off such a incredulous feat.
In fact, I wouldn't be too surprised if there are already several unregistered students today who go to Waterloo and are applying the above techniques every single day. It just seems so obvious.
If I were to do it all over again, this is perhaps what I'd do differently.
Time Pressured Examinations
It is with utmost regret that I inform you that even after just under a thousand hours of exam writing experience underneath my belt, I still haven't quite mastered the fine art of managing so-called time pressured examinations. But I'm getting better. Nonetheless, I think I got some interesting thoughts I'd like to share with you anyways.
What's a time pressured exam anyway? A time-pressured or time-sensitive exam is an examination that isn't intended to be completed, necessarily. The anticipated duration of the exam will generally be noticeably longer than the amount of time alloted. The number of questions will be far more than you think you can handle.
At Waterloo, which is the school I go to, the norm seems to be 3-hour exams in 2.5 hours. However, with time pressured exams, we'd often see 3.5 hour exams compressed into 2.5 hours.
Why are time pressured (TP) exams hard? They aren't exactly "hard" in the traditional meaning of the word "hard" per se. But they're hard for other reasons. For one, we can't get 100%, at least not as easily. And this fact alone tends to annoy a lot of people.
Also, from a very young age, we're generally taught to start with the first question and keep working through the exam until we hit the last. This time-tested traditional "algorithm" doesn't quite work that well for TP exams, and this too annoys a lot of people, because now we have to invent a new algorithm. And to make matters worse, we now have to do it on our own. How alarming.
TP exams are essentially a special class of optimization problems known as scheduling problems. The problem statement is as follows: Given a list of questions and the marks allotted to each question, determine the order in which the questions must be tackled in order to maximize marks obtained, under the constraint of insufficient time.
I've had to sit through a number of interesting time pressured exams. Sometimes, they tell us in advance it's going to be time pressured, like the GRE. Sometimes they don't, like the IB Paper 1 and Paper 3 exams. In all honesty, the most exciting TP exam I've ever had was the final exam for the Fall 2006 offering of MSCI 331, which ironically was an introductory course on optimization.
I personally feel time pressured exams are better than regular exams. For one, we don't have to know all the material taught in the course to get the best grade in the class. With regular exams, if we don't know the answer to even one question, we could be in trouble.
TP exams, on the other hand, tend to test us on what we know rather than what we don't know. But they're hard. We not only need to know which topics we're most comfortable with, we also need to know how comfortable we are with them.
Time pressured exams tend to work particularly well for math and engineering-oriented exams. They're very good at weeding out the bunch who crammed things into their heads the night before, because these students would take too long to solve each problem. On most math and engineering exams, given enough time, we could probably nail down the answer regardless by re-working everything from first principles. So examiners need to provide inadequate time to see who knows what the best.
Questions on a TP exam require tons of prior practice for us to have the right intuitions and the right speed. The Spring 2007 offering of MATH 212 Advanced Calculus 2 was one such gem: people who only studied a week before the exam all got low-80s or lower. And they all wished they had more time. If they did, they would've easily secured a 90. Not surprising.
A time pressured exam is best approached like a desert littered with diamonds. And we're given a fixed amount of time to spend at the desert. What do we do? We obviously scout the areas with the highest density of diamonds first.
What most of us do is approach TP exams like a pacman chomping away at a line of dots. We try to go in order, in a rather mechanical fashion, and when we get stuck on one of the earlier problems (usually the first or second), we get put off, lose hope, and complain. Or sometimes we stress that we may not have time to finish the entire exam, and the stress reduces our performance and causes us to make unintentional and silly arithmetic or algebraic errors that we wouldn't usually make.
The point we constantly miss is that the exam was designed to not be finished on time. It's not that we don't know the material well enough; even the prof probably couldn't finish the exam on time.
What I usually do on a time pressured exam is to invest the first five minutes of my time to read each question thoroughly. If there are only five questions on the exam, then I write down the order in which I plan to tackle the questions right away. If there are more questions, I write down approximately how long I think it would take me to solve the problem in minutes. If I don't feel like I can solve a particular problem, I just cross it off and don't bother with it. I do not try to solve every problem. I'll just end up wasting time if I did that. Then I divide the grades allotted to each question by the amount of time I feel it would take me to solve them. Then I rank the questions by decreasing value of these quotients and tackle the problems in that order. If I get stuck anywhere, I immediately proceed to the next question. This way, I solve the problems I know for sure first, then I try the challenging ones later if I have time left.
That's certainly one approach, and arguably the simplest. But there are more. Lots more in fact. We just have to come up with a clever game plan a day ahead of the exam. Of course, if our heuristic takes us more than 5 minutes to execute, we're defeating the purpose of the heuristic in the first place.
We definitely want to stay calm during a time pressured exam. We'll have a tendency to constantly look at the clock. We'll have a tendency to freak out as time starts to run out and we still have 4-5 unanswered questions. However, we need to have the composure of a bomb diffusal specialist: anxious but calm, tense but confident, uncertain but steady. You have to remember, if you can't finish the exam on time, neither can others. You just have to do relatively better than the rest of the class.
TP exams are fun games profs like to play with us, and our job is to win it.
