whew

well, one week of exams are over.

have two papers left, both of which i am quite unprepared for. have about three days to go. can be done. anyway, here are my thoughts on the papers so far:

monday: math hl. 
difficulty: 8/10
i could complete with confidence about 65% of the paper. the rest i either left totally or partially blank. should be able to salvage a few marks from there. the main obstacle was stress due to lack of time. have to work faster i guess. barring some serious careless mistakes, a grade 5-6 should be within reach.

tuesday: econs hl. 
paper 1 difficulty: 7/10
i was lucky in the sense that i read a full-length model essay of practically the same question that came out the day before. just some minor amendments required to fit the constraints of the question. problem is, i'm not sure if i left out the important bits. our paper is shorter so they require less content, but silly me may have written down the stuff we didn't need instead. the main difficulty was the lack of time and probably illegible handwriting.

paper 2 difficulty: 6/10
nothing terribly hard here. i had the answers to every question, so unless i messed up somewhere it should be pretty ok. i chose the second question because the 8-mark mini-essay question resembled a BnM one which we had lots of practise for before.

paper 3 difficulty: 4.5/10
the main difficulty is the math. the basic calculations were okay but we didn't get to practise the graph bits as this is a new paper that was introduced only this year. took a risk with the answer due to time running out, and a post-mortem revealed that i had the right answer. should get close to full marks for this one.

overall, i think a grade 6-7 should be achievable.

wednesday: chinese sl.
paper 1 difficulty: 9/10
totally didn't expect it to be this hard. the real IB papers are insanely easy. this is reminiscent of the time when i took higher chinese and didn't understand a damn thing. literally guessed 60% of the questions. a pass should be ok but getting a grade 7 seems a little on the impossible side. 

paper 2 difficulty: 6/10
nothing unexpected here. had lotsa time left over so drew some fancy thing. picture can be found on facebook. i'm just worried that i went off-topic. if all goes well a grade 6 wouldn't be hard.

combining both papers, a pass is definitely possible but it remains to be seen if it will be a grade 5 or 6.

friday: english a language & literature hl. 
difficulty: 7/10
nothing surprising. nothing much i can say. we sat for this type of paper before so i knew roughly what to expect. expect a grade 5-6. 7 if i'm terribly lucky but doubt that'll happen.

now to study for physics and bnm. ciao.

-Jont