Sunday, February 26, 2006

The Z-monster

It's not quite what you think it is. Clearly I've been lacking sleep the past few nights - working late, rising early. That biological clock of mine just refuse to allow me more sleep. Having gotten used to waking at 7.30am meant that I don't normally (repeat, normally) sleep past 8.30am.

But yup, I'm lacking sleep, which is why I'm losing focus with this entry: the Z-monster isn't about sleep (or lack thereof). I'm talking about the Z-curve.

Recall your statistics course in Uni. Or JC. Or whenever. There definitely was a time back in your schooling days of yore that you did some statistics. And if you know what I'm talking about, then you will surely remember the Normal distribution.

Quite an extraordinary feat of human ingenuity, this distribution. Effectively, its saying that half of any distribution is on this side, and its symmetrically on the other side as well. Like most things a human mind is capable of imagining, it has come to assume a phallic shape (especially more so when you reduce its 'spread'):



A normal distribution is also known as the z-curve. The z-curve is the bane of every INSEAD student.

Why do I say that? Coz we're graded based on the z-curve. This means that absolute marks don't count - one doesn't pass by getting 50% of the marks. One passes if he doesn't fall too far down the distribution to land beyond negative 2 sigma from the mean (i.e. 95 percentile bottom up).

The problem is that the z-curve forces you to be competitive: if you want to make it, you have to be just that much better than everyone else because everything is relative. How well you do is in relation to how badly someone else does. It is kind of like Harvard: the students there are so competitive that they'll sabotage your ability to perform wherever they can (disclaimer: Not a personal experience, hearsay only!!). Supposing you left your notes inadvertently in the library? They'll be gone the next moment - don't expect them back.

I digress - the whole problem is, this z-monster is making everyone work hard. Which means I have to work hard. And when I work hard, I can't blog much and my blog entries suffer from bad grammar and horrible sentence structures. Such as starting sentences with the word 'AND'. And not doing much about it. And the worst part: not actually caring.

Stressed I am. Exams force you to a corner and it makes you work your ass off for artificial rewards. I can only hope that I do well enough not to fall too far off the mean - everyone here is smart (the average GMAT is 700 something I recall) and everyone here is to some degree competitive.

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I meant to write something about Brokeback Mountain, which I saw last Saturday... it touched me, but the thing is, what I wanted to write was a memory which the premise of Brokeback Mountain triggered (and it is kind of crude compared to the sensitivity on display in Brokeback). Later perhaps - keep coming back and I might just put it up. :)

Right. Back to studying....

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good analyze, I confirm.

Martial (one of the few non-competitive people at INSEAD ;-)