Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Physics’ Category

Although it’s not possible to make direct comparisons between the figures from 2009, it is possible to make a few observations about the spread of those marks.

The breakdown in the Autumn 2009 Sesame gives the breakdown of grades 1 to 4 (the four pass grades) as 22.9%, 23.6%, 22.2% and 15.6% (thus 15.7% failed it, or, for the more optimistic, 84.3% passed it).

Because we only have the marks in part 1 (the multiple choice bit) and part 2 (the two short answer sections), it’s not possible to just add the figures we have together. However, since the grade ones in part 2 totalled 4% and grades 1 and 2 in part 2 totalled 20%, it seems sure that the overall spread of marks this year is substantially below that of 2009.

That an exam is particularly difficult or particularly easy in any given year shouldn’t matter as marks are generally “adjusted” on the basis that, on average, a given cohort of students should be similar to any other cohort and therefore should get similar marks hence the marks are generally adjusted. That doesn’t seem to have happened this year though.

Or maybe they have and something threw a spanner in the works? Like the very oddly distributed marks of question 16 perhaps?

It seemed at the time to be a difficult course to revise for and it proved to be quite difficult to do on the day too.

The multiple choice part was by far the easiest to do in practice with 60% of people picking up 70% (ie grade 1 or 2) on it and only 6% failing it.

The short answer questions show a dramatic drop in overall performance though. Although the individual question results don’t look too bad (50% in grade 1 or 2 in the two easiest questions, 25% on the two hardest in part 1), the overall mark for this section of the paper shows only 20% getting grade 1 or 2 and 25% failing it which means that a number of people didn’t answer the required number of questions.

By far the worst section was cosmology with question 15 on dark matter being a disaster for most people. Only 49% passed it and just 7% picked up a grade 1 or 2. Surprisingly, question 13 on Hubble classifications wasn’t much better with 52% passing it and 12% getting grade 1 or 2; I’m not sure why this happened as the question doesn’t look amazingly difficult but clearly an awful lot of people dropped marks all over the place on it.

Some individual questions proved to be surprisingly difficult and have a deceptively easy look to them. Question 10 on star properties felled 35% of those doing it and Question 12 on the end of life of stars proved to be difficult to do really well with although most people passed it. The Hubble classification question was a shock to me as it looks like it should be easy to do well with it yet few did and almost half failed it. Probably the oddest result is that of the final question on the universe though, with almost identical numbers of people in every percentile which implies that people generally did that last and just answered whatever they could. Quite a peculiar spread to the marks even so.

Answering the right number of questions is something that many people fell down on. Despite not overly great marks in individual questions the overall marks for the short answer section were lower than most individual questions which implies that people skipped questions altogether. You just can’t afford to do that on a difficult paper and it resulted in 25% of people failing that section. Thanks to the multiple choice section this equates to around 10% failing overall.

Rather a difficult subject to do well with and one that I’m glad I don’t have to repeat. Commiserations to the 40 or so people who will be resitting it.

S197 is one of those Open University courses that people are rather put off by as it’s acquired a reputation of being one of the most difficult of the science short courses.

There’s reason behind that view too. It seems to have a fair amount of both mathematics and weird terminology if the extract from it in OpenLearn is anything to go by. Having said that, the short courses tend to start at a fairly basic level and get you to a level that you didn’t think you’d reach in surprisingly few pages so I’m sure that in reality this one is no different.

It would have been handy to have done this one before the astronomy course as it covers a lot of the ground from the later cosmology chapters. On the other hand, it’s still going to be handy as a pre-course for the main physics course which I’ll be getting around to in a few years time. Sadly, it’s not going to be around at that time as the last run is in May 2011 so I’ll need to squeeze it into what’ll be a fairly busy summer period.

The one downside of doing it is that I can’t count it alongside S104 which means that it’ll need to be added to the open degree rather than the physics one where it really belongs.

The time during the exam just flew in and for the first time ever I didn’t have the luxury of having enough time to check the answers. Having said that, I usually end up “correcting” things to the wrong answer when I’ve lots of time to play with. It was also amongst the most tiring exams that I’ve done too. Since it was effectively made up of around 70 short questions (ie 8 multiple choice, and six from eight short questions with up to 10 parts each) you needed to keep the concentration full-on right through the paper.

The multiple choice questions turned out to be generally quite doable and I’ve only one almost complete guess amongst them when my brain just couldn’t get around a question on red-shifts and Hubble’s constant. Overall on that I reckoned I picked up, on my pessimistic view, around 19.5% out of a possible 28% so half-way to a pass on that bit which was a good start.

Part two on the sun & stars book was generally fine and I could have had a reasonable stab at all four questions. It’s harder to estimate the performance on those ones so I reckoned something like another 18% from that although it could have been higher. Picking the third question turned out to require some thought as I couldn’t do 100% of either of the two remaining with certainty so I followed my thinking from last week and did the one where I could get the highest score rather than just plump for the one that was in my more comfortable topic area.

Part three on cosmology looked horrible at the start. I started off on my two least worst, choosing the one that I thought I could do most parts of first. As it turned out, that was actually my worst question in that section and I think I did really well on the two almost-essay questions in the hard-core cosmology bit. I say almost-essay as whilst the answer for them took the form of an essay the questions were effectively broken up into 15 parts for the second of the two (although it was the most essay-like of the two). Net effect is that for an essay question it looked easy to estimate the marks for it. In the exam I was estimating another 18% for this bit but I think it’ll be a little higher as I checked some of the stuff afterwards.

Taken overall that gives me a pessimistic estimate of around 60% which is nicely clear of the pass mark. High end mark? Maybe into the 70s but I’ll know better when the exam paper is released later this week.

What does seem clear from this is that it’s better to consider the second and third parts of the paper as if they were around 40 short questions that just happen to be presented in four groups. For instance, in one case the part that I couldn’t do in one question amounted to only 2 out of a possible 12 per cent. In fact, with that thinking it’s probably better to aim for the questions with the most parts.

Also notable is that in a lot of cases you had, say, part b (i) introducing a term then parts ii, iii, and iv went on to talk about things related to that. For example, you might have something say “define a black hole” whilst the next part asked what a massive star would leave behind. It’s going to be a black hole, isn’t it? (no, that’s not an actual question from the paper) Because of that, it definitely pays to read the whole question before answering any part of it.

Turnout was extremely low with only three from seven there. As one who’d not been pointed out this was a very lonely course without the proper number of tutorials and I think that contributed to the high dropout rate throughout the year.

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Since the OU claim to have over 200,000 students enrolled in courses at any one time and with a sizeable number of those being quite computer literate, you’d think that there would be more than 15 active blogs written by their students. So where are they?

Although I don’t constantly trawl for them, the 14 that are currently listed in the blog roll are all the active ones that I’ve found and includes those pinched from the blog rolls of those on the list plus some more who are no longer active. Those that aren’t actively writing include some who have completed their courses and don’t seem to be continuing with the blog at the moment.

There’s also at least one OU tutor who went and deleted what was far and away the best ever advert that A207 has had in the form of a blog that she ran whilst tutoring the course. Not only did she stop writing it when she finished her tutoring roll but she deleted it altogether. Why do people do stuff like that? I’d bookmarked it for the day when I get around to doing the course and now it’s gone 🙁

And then there’s the bloggers who run out of steam for one reason or another. That happens to bloggers everywhere so I guess it’s no different when it’s OU bloggers that are no different though with the added issues of time pressure from the degree itself.

But none of that really explains why there are so few OU bloggers around. With 200k students to draw upon I’d have expected at least 100 and perhaps even more given that many of the courses offered are all about writing.

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