Accounting exam

The first semester of my MBA course is drawing to a close and the concluding exam is on Wednesday morning. I have been a witness for the past week to an ongoing battle between different parts of my brain: the mid-brain (probably the amygdala) keeps on saying that there is an important exam in a few days and one has to revise, revise, revise, whereas the top brain (the cortex) is calming the amygdalae down, saying that yes, there is an exam, but this is accountancy after all, a subject which I have been practising for years, and judging by my performance on the test exams, I'm going to get 75% without even trying very hard.

In the previous week (not the one just finished but the one before that), we had a guest lecturer from the home university come and give us three lessons. This is apparently a rare occurrence, which happens once every three-four years, so my fellow students and I should consider ourselves lucky. For reasons unknown to me (although I can guess), only about a third of the class attended these lectures. I think that this is a shame, because the lecturer went over test exams, taking a more tactical approach to that taken by our normal lecturer, and I found  this approach complimentary to what we had already learnt. In other words, those lectures will help me get a higher mark. The lecturer is the man who actually writes the exam questions so of course he has insight on how to solve them. He was careful not to give away which subjects will appear in the exam paper, claiming that he writes the questions two years in advance (as they have to be checked and translated) and so does not remember what will be in any specific exam. I think that there was a certain amount of truth in his statement, but felt that he probably did know what was in the paper.

I am going to take the middle course: devote an hour or two each evening to the areas in which I don't feel confident and which haven't been examined in the past four courses (the lecturer left us a list of which subjects have appeared in which exams). In my opinion, most of the areas are straight forward, and one only needs common sense aligned with mathematical sense to answer the questions. Of course, 'mathematical sense' is not shared equally between all students; for me, accountancy is easy because it aligns with my skills. It is considered one of the 'harder' subjects in the MBA constellation, both in the sense of 'hard' (as opposed to 'soft') and 'hard' (as opposed to 'easy'). Next semester I am taking the course in organisational behaviour, which is supposed to be both soft and easy. I suspect that the exam will be harder for me than the accountancy exam.

'Next semester' starts this Friday; the winter semester is short and compact. Our timetable reads as follows: Friday 4 Dec – last accountancy lecture; Wednesday 9 Dec – accountancy exam; Friday 11 Dec – first lecture in winter semester; Sunday 13 Dec – second lecture in winter semester.