Exams

Hey /prog/

Had a programming examination today. I'm a second year comp. eng student at McMaster in Canada, and man, the kind of grief the exam gave my friends and I was..haha it was rough.

But as I was looking at the questions on the exam (for reference, it was basically Java, & C++), I had to ask myself: "What the hell is so great about OO programming?"

When it comes to Java, it bothers me that all objects are passed by ref, that casts are only checked at run-time, and just, well the overall slugishness I seem to feel when I'm trying to develop code. Is it wrong to feel a lack of interest (and a lack of a good mark) in a course I'm supposed to be enjoying, and paying for out of my own pocket?

I'm not going to pretend I'm a whiz kid at programming, I know there are members of /prog/ who could laugh at the questions had they seen the exam.

Anyways, I wanted to hear from you guys, share your experiences of crappy setbacks in college/uni from comp sci/software eng/comp eng, etc.

Is it wrong to feel a lack of interest (and a lack of a good mark) in a course I'm supposed to be enjoying, and paying for out of my own pocket?
Academia has a way of making almost everything boring.

As far as exams involving programming, the big marks go to those code-writing questions. Don't be tempted to jump in and start writing code immediately. Come up with an approach, then an algo, and _then_ write your code. I've given a few substandard answers in the past because I rushed in, but I've learned my lesson.

What really bugs me about writing code on paper is that paper doesn't lend itself well to the way I do things. For example, I like putting in my brackets first, and then filling them with content, but you can't really do that on paper.