What a start! Doing badly in an exam gives you a chance to reflect on things, such as what the point of not just the exam, but the whole unit. In this particular case, it is all the more frustrating because there was a lot of subject matter that I cared about. What's funny is that the marker won't see this, and take me for some vapid fool who doesn't see why Proxy is an obvious choice for the question. The marker, of course, doesn't see the hours spent reading wikis and sifting through documents on OO principles, finding blogs related to design, tricking my brain into learning about patterns through doodles, and so on. The greater goal in all those things was to learn, not to get a mark, and I achieved that to a certain degree. But this dismal result does no good to my confidence, nor to my will to put any effort into actually learning (this is only temporary, I'm sure, but still, it is largely demotivating). Gumption traps, eh? Listen really close and you can hear it all escaping..!

I suppose it's much as I feared, in that my appreciation for patterns has been marred by my inability to apply them in any practical sense. I get the (elitist) feeling that my peers are no better off than me, but I always seem to think like this. Invariably I end up attaching some rather arbitrary number to such a subject, but I am glad that this particular subject has produced more, and given a brief glimpse of a possibility of some sort of fulfilling future.

(This post was intended to be made a couple of weeks earlier, although you wouldn't know it from the date, but I decided to continue the ancient practice handed down from generation to generation of not posting here during exams. The rationale is to minimize distraction, but what it actually does is reduce the number of available scapegoats. So now it would seem that the only person to blame for my results is myself! Ahhh, tricks and turns at every corner!)