How to nail an assignment

Image Courtesy: Jared - MAT237 Assignment 2

I just discovered one of the major problems I had when doing assignments (Whether it was for CSC165 or CSc236 or any other subject) while working on Assignment 3. I found that I was thinking too hard and most of the time, I misread the question. While working on A3, the first thing I noticed about question 1 was a proof on an iterative program. Immediately I put in some values and calculated the output and I noticed that q returned the number of times the while loop executed and r would give the GCD() of the two numbers n,m. I wrote a 1.5 page proof on it...

Well it sure was ugly and when I showed it to my assignment partner, he was surprised and he simply asked me:

"Why?"

I was surprised and when he told me what the function exactly does and the fact that it was already described, I felt stupid and I felt that I wasted a lot of time writing the unnecessary proof. It was so simple that after sometime I asked myself:

"Why didn't I think of that in the first place? and what made me think of GCD()?!!"

The second mistake I made was on question 4. I actually thought we had to hand in a complete DFSA. Well it turned out that we simply had to submit the state invariants and that would give the TA's a clear idea of how the machine worked. It shows that I didnt even read the question properly and thought too much on it when it was simple. Maybe I panicked and tried designing a DFSA and used a series of inputs to test it. But when I did so, I found that I was going round and round and that trial-and-error may not be effective in solving this kind of problem.

I did have some problems understanding how to develop a technique to count multiples of 5. Thats when I went to Danny and he explained to me how to tackle this sort of problem. Well everything went well after that but the only thing bothering me is that I feel being careless can be very dangerous and can account for most mistakes. Simple misinterpretations can lead to disaster and working with a partner really helped me find my faults.

I hope any student that reads this post will learn something about my experiences and will be careful when tackling assignments. Anyways I have made it a habit now that for any subject, if I dont understand something in the assignment, I would go and ask the TA's at the help center or the instructor.