Exams

In Poland there is an examination session twice a year.

After approximately to weeks of hectic work on finishing projects, passing all the test to be able to write exams we jump right into examination session. Semester ending on Friday, first exam next Monday.

It's pretty overwhelming. But what do. Learn. I don't like thisform of grading not because of stress, big amount of knowledge to learn in little time. I don't like it because this material is so inflexible and sometimes stupid and because of that so boring and hardly applicable.

I enjoy learning physics, but I don't learning it for exams.

Wikipedia in the process of learning

What I also hate is poor quality of polish wikipedia articles. In less than a week I read a lot of bullshit or just strongly incomplete articles. I would like to spend some time to work on wikipedia, but I don't feel like an expert in those fields I'm talking about. Why would I read those articles anyway? Articles in English are much better - it's very helpful.

I like definition articles because they're striving to be self contained and are exactly about defining and describing, which is what theoretical exams want us to do.

Stupid students

To end my today rant I add a few words about "students learning materials". There are a few documents named script for That and That. Some of them are poorly written, some are bit better and quite helpful in preparation to the exam. Their written in LaTeX, it's easy to notice it's font. But there are mistakes... some are minor typos, some are just incorrect information or are incomplete. I would gladly work on those materials, but they are distributed in pdf format. Great for collaboration isn't it?

So we as a students pass this materials around, learn from them a bit, pass to next generation... And those materials are slightly deteriorating. Why? Are we to stupid to edit LaTeX? No. Someone already wrote it in LaTeX. Can't we use version control? Github is waiting for us with unlimited public repositories and great collaboration structure. There is also a bitbucket if we want to make it private. There weren't such tools in for example 2004, but they are in 2014, we should take advantage of them.

But how many people work with git if they don't have CS background? They would barely download the pdf, print it, make some notes on the side, use some colors, learn from it and nothing would be merged back into community from their knowledge. Nothing. Nothing will improve.

But we could have nice things...