Midterms & Project 1 Grade

I’ve been gone from the blog for a while because of midterms in my two grad classes (Risk Analysis and Machine Learning), and I was about to come back and write about an algorithm I explored that wasn’t related to one of my classes, but my Machine Learning professor went and assigned another project that I need to get into now. He was originally only going to give us 10 days to do it, but students let him know that was a really short turnaround time, with only one weekend and not a lot of advance notice that the project was coming, so he extended it by a week. I’ll post about it after this.

I didn’t do well on my Machine Learning midterm. It was my first closed-note, closed-book, timed test I’ve had since 10 years ago in undergrad, I didn’t study for it really well, I was already struggling with the heavy math in this class, and was sleep-deprived from completing the take home test for my other class, so I had a total-blank-out moment during the ML midterm and bombed it. It was especially frustrating to me because what he ended up asking in the main problem was from the “easier” part of the course and I should have known how to do it.

However, I did really well on the last project I posted on the blog (105/100), so my grade in the course is salvageable. He said something was wrong with my KNN code, so I’ll have to go back and look at that when I get a chance, but I got extra credit for finishing it on time before he gave an extension, and got everything else correct, so yay! All is not lost grade-wise, and I’m proud of myself for learning enough Python to complete that on time. Also, there is a final project in this class and not an exam, so that will be better for me. (I think we have 2 more projects after the current one!)

So, I’ll write about the new project next, but wanted to record how the exam and project ended up!