Category: Never say Never. An expression often spoken by optimists, to diffuse the pessimism espoused by those of us with a more cynical (or, “analytical” as I like to think about it) nature. The irony, of course, is that by using that phrase you say ‘never’ twice. Regardless, I’m going to bend the common meaning of the phrase, to make it feel optimistic:
There will NEVER be another exam as hard as the Decision Models exam we just took.
I realize this is a funny and rather bold statement in light of my comments about last semester’s Accounting exam. In retrospect, that exam was difficult, but only due to the sheer volume of material and the generally complex, and often perverse, “logic” of Accounting. But for that exam, at least there were examples that we could refer to from the notes and the textbook. I may not have understood why you write the journal entry for operating leases the way you do, but I was confident that I could at least mimic an answer based on a previous class example.
Decision models afforded no such luxury. Knowing how to use Crystal Ball, Solver, or TreePlan was a necessary, but not sufficient condition to doing well on this exam. Heck, I’d even go as far as saying that besides getting practice on the types of problems you needed to solve, none of the homework or case studies really gave too much insight on how to solve this set of questions.
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