Part III exams
Posted by Martin Orr on Monday, 08 June 2009 at 13:32
The Part III exams took place in the last couple of weeks. It was quite strange for me to do exams where you are expected to answer all or most of the questions - the undergraduate maths exams have several times more questions to choose from than anyone could possibly do and in olympiad exams completing each question is an achievement.
The most common form of a Part III exam is questions which simply ask you to write out proofs from the course. Three of my five exams took this form, and it's quite boring - except one of those, where the content was very hard so just recalling bits of the lectures is a challenge. Elliptic Curves livened things up a bit with some computation, although that is rather tedious in a different way. And my last exam, in Modular Forms, had a much better balance of bookwork and problems, although it was the hardest exam I did.