Skill issues

GRK (Computer Graphics) Any%

In the beginning of Semester 5, GRK was presented to us as some sort of "New Wave" course. These were the rules that were presented as "New Wave".

What they meant by this is that passing the course requires you to pass both the lab and the lecture separately. This implies that if you passed the lab, but failed the lecture, you would have to retake the entire course (both the lab and the exam). In normal circumstances, you would just retake the exam. What a deeply unserious university.

Anyways, I will go over the speedrun strategies to tackle GRK.

General strategies

Within this speedrun category in general, your goal is to achieve exam exemption and pass with a minimum passing grade so as to save time. If, for whatever reason, you ended up having to take the exam, then no problem, you'll be treated to some strategy discussion on acing the exam to compensate for losing out on a potential world record pace.

Lab

Keep in mind that the rules are ever-changing and that the grading may differ from professor to professor, as is with almost every class.

Here, the rules are simple: your final grade for the labs is the average of all obtained grades from the tasks. Each task can range between 2 and 5 (2 being a failure, 5 being the best). So the best strategy here is to do 1 task per each assignment.

Completing each task isn't enough: you have to present each completed task and demonstrate your understanding of Computer Graphics topic(s) relevant to the task and the task at hand. It may sound scary, but trust me, it's not that bad. Let's start by talking strategy regarding this, actually:

Presenting the task

Professors know nowadays know that you can just AI generate the solutions to the tasks, so to combat this, they test your knowledge (and let's be real, your patience as well) and ask you some small questions like "how do you change this part of the task so that the line drawn is always visible".

You're mostly expected to explain how your solution works. The only way to tackle this is to read through, understand your solution and the Lab material before the day of the presentation. There's no glitch to sidestep this, unfortunately. But luckily, every single material related to GRK is available in the professor's website: GRK: Computer Graphics Laboratories

Each task from there is uploaded biweekly on Teams, so to save time, just use the website to access all the tasks anyway.

You can find solutions to all the Grade 3 MPs (partial exception to 5 and 6) here in my GRK resource collection.

Lecture (Tests)

Do I need to attend the lectures?

The lectures (as of writing) should be recorded. So, spare yourself the commute time and crank the video player speed to 2x.

Strategies

There are two tests that are held in the first half and second half of the semester. To pass (and to be exam-exempt), you need at least 21 points from both tests. Tests 1 and 2 both have max 15 points each. You only need to focus on topics from lectures 1 to 12.

Each test has around 3 to 4 questions. How points are divided by each question is a question unto itself, but it's not difficult to earn a lot of points (you can earn points even if you get the answer wrong so long as you write the correct formula, for example).

I have written down solutions to exemplar questions for both Tests 1 and 2, check it out on my GRK resource collection, look for the files "Studying Graphics partX".

During tests 1 and 2 and during the exam, you're allowed to bring practically any physical resource with you to aid in completing the tests (except for your phone, laptop, etc.. of course). There's only 1hr30mins allotted, so try not to compensate any prior revision of the material with only relying on the physical resources during the test/exam, as you might end up wasting more time than saving it.

The general strategy here is to solve and take note of the exemplar questions prior, bring the notes with you to the test with the expectation that the questions from the exemplars to be slightly different during the actual test (the values will differ, but the actual questions will be 1:1). Not much else to it.

For the fastest pace, I would recommend printing my solutions to the solved exemplar questions as they include more than just solutions: there's formulas, conversion tables, step-by-step walkthroughs and so on.

Lecture (Exam/Exam Retake)

The strats are practically the same as the previous section, but there are some technical differences to take into account:

If you end up having to retake the exam, then: