Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Physics’ Category

All being well, I will have completed my run-through of the revision notes by this afternoon so that leaves Saturday and Sunday for some last-minute stuff.

My plan at the moment is that I’ll put the books to one side and go through the short question sections of one or two past papers on Saturday with a final read-through of the revision notes over the course of Sunday. That’s if I find I can answer the first past paper from memory, of course; otherwise Saturday will be drafted in as a revision session too. One of the more important things to do is to look at the formulae and constants that are given with the exam paper and check that I know what each of them are for.

Also to be done is assembling all the bits and pieces for the day itself. As it’s a science exam that list is a little bit longer than usual with the addition of a calculator and my drawing set in case I feel the urge to run up a diagram at some point. Also in there are the gel refills for the pens though there’s not so much writing for this one as for the psychology so I’ll likely just use the ordinary refill. I’ve still to print the exam allocation page and track down the passport for id. And, of course, the Lucozade and wine gums. Despite the vast amount of revision I’ve done for this in comparison that for previous exams I suspect there’ll be a number of “wine gum moments” (ie when I’m staring at the exam paper and haven’t a clue where to start).

‘Tis odd to think that this time last year I was working on the Child Development revision. I see from the drastic increase in hits on the site that lots of people are doing that right now.

Just seven days and it’ll all be over or, to put it another way, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to pack in all the necessary revision.

Actually it does seem fairly doable at the moment and most of the stuff that seemed impossible to understand a few weeks ago makes sense now. I can even remember a reasonable chunk of it.

What I’ve been doing and will be continuing to do is to go over the 29 pages worth of learning outcomes and chapter summaries that I extracted from the books a month or so ago (if you’re doing it this year, you can get this from the TMA4 forum under question 4). I’ve been adding to that where the chapter summaries didn’t seem to be enough to meet the learning outcomes or if I came across a question that couldn’t be answered from them. That’s taking up a surprising amount of time although the amount of information I’m adding isn’t massive: mainly assorted variants of the HR-diagram.

I’ve been saving up a last look at the short questions from the past papers as I want to see if I can do them now. I’ve already gone over the multiple choice questions which, as I said a while back, are much the same as the short questions.

Quite soon I’ll be getting the contents of my exam bag assembled. As with the biology exam in June that’s going to include a calculator and my little drawing set. I don’t think there’s enough time to do a whole lot of drawing for the short questions as there’s only about 20 minutes altogether for each of the three questions on each book.

Given the way the exam paper is broken into so many different parts, it’s worth bearing in mind that the multiple choice questions are only worth 3.5% each so not being able to do one isn’t a disaster (though do guess if need-be: you’ve nothing to lose). Also on the short questions whilst each question might be worth 12%, there are so many parts that you’re looking at as little as 2% for some question parts and, from a quick glance through, never more than 4%. The best approach to these is not to look for the three questions in areas which you know most about but rather for the three questions that are made up of the greatest number of parts which you can answer. Bear in mind that you get points for part answers too. For example, in 2009 3% could be had by listing four ways in which an Elliptical galaxy will differ from the Milky Way; saying just that one is elliptical in shape whilst the other is a spiral and that one is older than the other would potentially net 1.5% without even thinking of anything complicated.

In amongst all that, I’ve started thinking some more about my options for doing the planetary science course (S283). It turns out that thanks to the November start date, it’s not too late to sign up for it this year although registration closes on the 14th so I can’t fiddle about too much. I think it’s probably viable for me in that last year I was able to finish off SK277 (which was my first ever biology course) by late March so there wouldn’t really be much overlap with S204. Moreover, by the time I was into the overlap period S283 would be into the biology half. Plus points on that are that it would get me the Certificate of Astronomy and Planetary Science and add to my planned chemistry cum physics degree. Downside is that it means dropping the option of doing the fossils and history of life course though presumably I’ll be covering that material in the evolution course in 2013/2014. I’d also be running it alongside the microbes course (S171) though I can string that out ’til April if need-be. Must see if I can get a quick look over the course materials tomorrow before doing anything drastic.

Now that I’ve realised that I can use some of the short courses to bulk up the life sciences degree to the 360 points, it opens up a whole range of options for the October to June slot for the next two or three years.

Since it’s now basically a free choice in October I could include the World Archaeology course which I’ve been wanting to do for a while now and with its new November start date it’s looking very doable.

A second series of options relate to the psychology degree. I’d been planning on skipping level one altogether for that but as I won’t finish it before 2015 I’ll have to include both Discovering Psychology (no exam) and Introducing Health Sciences (a life sciences course obviously). In fact, postponing S205 gives me both October 2011 and October 2012 as slots for those.

Finally, there’s Planetary science and the search for life which would complete my Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science.

I don’t need to decide between them ’til after Easter which is handy as it’ll give me enough time to see how the certificate in web applications courses run alongside larger courses. At the moment I think my front runner would be the world archaeology course probably followed by the planetary science one the following year.

All Open University courses with exams offer a certain amount of guidance as to what and how to revise for the final exam.

So, for instance, ED209 and SK277 gave a list of chapters from which the essay questions would be drawn. Unfortunately, S282 doesn’t have any essay questions so the assumption is that you will know the entire course. In practical terms that means that the amount of revision required for this 30 point course is much more than you’d normally need to do for a 60 point course.

The lack of essay questions means that there’s no difference in the approach to revision between the multiple choice questions and the short answer ones. The only practical difference arises on the day itself (the 18th is awfully close, isn’t it?) when you’ve to answer all of the multiple choice questions but only six from eight of the short answer ones. For example, “The solar spectrum can be approximated by a black-body spectrum with a temperature of 5770 K. At what wavelength, in nm, does the peak emission occur in this black-body spectrum?” could (and has) appeared as both a multiple choice question and as part of a short answer question.

So, given that there’s getting on for a thousand pages in the course books, what’s the best approach to revising for the exam?

First off, don’t forget two very important pages in the exam headed “Useful data, equations and expressions” which contain all the constants and equations that you’ll need to answer the questions and some more that you don’t need. Thus you don’t need to memorise the equations dotted throughout the course although you will need to remember what the symbols mean and, of course, what equation to use in which circumstances.

Second, the best place to begin revising seems to be to pull out all the excellent chapter summaries along with the learning outcomes (only available through the course website). If you’re doing the course in 2010 you’ll find my copy of this on the TMA4 conference under question 4; I can’t make it available here as it’s OU copyright. One important thing to note about this is that the chapter summaries don’t address all the learning outcomes although there aren’t many that they miss. Also, they don’t include diagrams thus they don’t have the frequency spectrum (required for a couple of questions in past papers) and they don’t include the HR-diagram which is regularly required in exams. You can easily add those to the summaries though.

Finally, there are the past papers. Only five years worth of these are available at any one time thus in 2010 you can get 2005-2009. Whilst somebody has quite usefully done a full analysis of where the questions came from, in reality the answer was “just about everywhere”.

A very useful approach seems to be to go through the chapter summaries, then work through the past papers to gain speed and confidence with the questions (you can get the answers from the past papers forum) and finally go back to the summaries and add whatever additional information was required to answer the questions. It’s time consuming but there seems to be no way to avoid that for this exam.

It’s also worth noting that it is possible to pass this and around 85% of those sitting the exam in 2009 passed. The questions might initially look impossible to do but with a bit of work they are doable and fairly quickly too for the most part.

Incoming search terms:

• S282 past papers
• astronomy revision

The final TMA of the astronomy course looked pretty much impossible to do at first glance and seems to be the cause of a substantial number of people seriously considering dropping out of the course if the forum comments are anything to go by.

The big difference between this one and the previous one is that it’s very much into the theoretical physics (ie mathematical) side of the course basically because it’s largely based on the cosmology section of the course where the heavy duty mathematics comes in. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s particularly difficult but what it does require is a completely different way of thinking about the questions. So, instead of looking up how to describe the appearance of a galaxy you get questions like “Using information from An Introduction to Galaxies and Cosmology, estimate R(t1) / R(t0)” which require a major shift in problem solving techniques from what went before.

Once you have flicked over to the mathematical approach, the seemingly impossible questions turn out to be fairly easy, albeit involving scary looking numbers most of the time. Essentially what’s required for most of them is to find a formula in the book which refers to the pieces of information that you’re given and getting out the calculator. Even the most complex doesn’t require more than a relatively simple rearrangement of a formula given in the book and seeing as they go so far as quoting the chapter in the book from which the questions are taken, it’s not too difficult to find the necessary formulae.

What it does show is that the guidance in the “Are you ready for S282?” guide that the “level of maths required for S282 is not high”, whilst true, is rather misleading. No, the level of maths isn’t that high but what it does require is that you are able to think like a mathematician.

That’s the final TMA that counts towards the result. There is a CMA to do but that doesn’t affect the mark so whilst I’ll have a look at it, I’ve not decided whether or not to do it as ’tis time to get going on the revision.