2007-06-16

This is causality

There is a legend among Oxford students, where degrees and honours are determined by a final examination of 6-8 3-hour exams in the final year summer.

In science subjects there are typically 8-12 questions and the students will try to finish as many as possible. But complete answer of about 3 questions would probably give you an "alpha" grade as each question carries a full score of 25 and this score will be squared (3x625=1875, vs 10 questions of 10 scores each scoring 10x100=1000). Therefore, the "top first" would score as many as 5000 in a paper (for a rare "alpha plus" score) while to get alpha you only need to score 2000.

In humanity subject, the paper quite often is a single essay on a very concisely phrased question/issue. To illustrate the paper and the how the scores are determined we have this legend

  • Question: "What is risk?" (I do not know what the subject is, probably philosophy or literature, or economic!. It is just an un-verifiable legend anyway)
  • A student went in, answered with three words, left the examination hall and got an alpha
  • His full essay for the 3 hour exam? "This is risk."

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In HK it is unlikely that this will happen, as we know. There is no trust/mutual-respect in our education system for this. The student would not dare the risk and the professor will assume the student is unruly. But I think Mr Lam Kay would score an alpha in this

To spray salt on his wounded feet, I would also like to add these

  • When Tung's father passed away and left OOIL (Oriental Overseas), it went bankrupt
  • When Tung left OOIL, OOIL stock price shot to the sky between the period of 1997-2004

This "Folk-Guy" had some track record but nobody I knew agreed with me when I talked about that 10 years ago. sigh...

1 comment:

無名 said...

Hi Sun Bin,

About the "This is risk" and get an alpha..... totally agree.

The mentality of a lecturer dictate the outcome of the graduate cohort and even the country, I think. e.g. in my field, I have encountered a scenario in which the lecturer talked to a doctorate candidate who presented how the current technology helps people with memory problem.... "It is going not going to happen in the next 20 years...... that's why I give you a pass (only!-- so lenient that I haven't given you a failing grade)"

Well, google (and MS) is now building huge servers to store everything instantly. That is why some country never have any real innovations, while US, UK will.

Cheers,