# Chateau de la Tobler

## Friday, August 18, 2006

### No more COMPS, I hope

G'Day to my family. I wanted to add a little post telling you all of the wonderful exam I finished taking today. For those of you who do not know, which might be no one, I took a 2 part exam last Wednesday and today, Friday. This exam is supposed to cover all the material that I should have learned as an undergraduate in physics and all that I should have learned in my first year as a graduate in physics. They group the topics into 4 different regions of study: Classical Mechanics (Rocket science), Electricity and Magnetism (EM), Quantum Mechanics (the weird stuff), and Statistics/Thermodynamics (Stats). Wednesday was Classical and E&M. Today was Quantum and Stats.I have been studying for this exam since before Dad's funeral. I felt that E&M was my weakest subject and so I studying that subject the most. I'm glad I did. After the exam was over on Wednesday I felt I did a great job. I most likely made small errors here and there but I felt I did great. Today was a very different story. I did not feel that I did as good today. Here is a little about the exam.
Each section has either 4 or 5 problems for us to do. We have to do all but 1 problem in each section. This mean we do 3 or 4 problems, depending on the section. They have the exam split up so that we have to do 7 problems per day. The time limit is 5 hours. We meet at 8am and they stop us at 1pm, unless we stop ourselves and give up. Wednesday I finished at 12:30 and today I finished at 12:45.
Now for the scoring. Although I will not know for sure if I pass or not until they are graded, I hope within the next 2 weeks, here is the passing percentages:
Passing at the Master's level - 30%
Passing at the PhD level - 50%
These percentages are an average over the 4 sections. This means I can do fairly poorly on one section but pull the overall percentage up with the other 3 sections. Those that pass at the PhD level also qualify for the Master's level.
I will let eveyone know how I did as soon as I get the results. I will either be excited to have passed or upset that I will have to take the test again in January. Lots of love. SKT

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