Foreign Perspectives

In theory my course decisions for the next couple of years should be very easy in that I spent time on working out my overall course schedule a couple of years ago.

Now, to be fair, the OU messed me up by changing the goal posts last year and cutting short all the named science degrees. However, that simply resulted in a change in the sequence of the courses rather than a change in the overall strategy. Now that I’m actually getting going on the courses it’s introduced a few more thoughts.

To begin with my overall plan was to do both a physics and a psychology degree. In practice, I ended up started on the psychology degree last year though once that was underway it turned out that it was sensible to add in a biology course which I’m in the process of finishing off. Then, thanks to the OUs cancellation of named science degrees, I needed to get going on the physics hence I’m in the midst of the astronomy course right now.

Overall, this has the effect that I’m effectively in the midst of a psychology, biology and physics degree or rather courses from all three. The problem is that I’m finding that the biology is both much easier than expected and extremely interesting too. On the other hand, I’m finding that the astronomy isn’t as interesting as I’d expected it to be. Strangely I now find myself wondering if biology rather than physics would be the way to go for me. Thus, I’ve not yet gotten around to signing up for the major physics course starting this October.

Ordinarily, this would be fine but with the withdrawal of all named science degrees kicking in over the next couple of years it means that when I choose either physics or biology I definitely won’t be able to do the other one.

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Now that I’ve come across the overall results for ED209 I’m finding that they’re quite fascinating reading.

For a start, despite everyone knowing about one of the questions in advance, 7 people didn’t answer it!

As expected, most people did the questions on the first two books as the third was a) perceived as harder than the other two and b) much thicker than them. In fact, over twice the number did the other questions and a mere 15% did the question on categorisation and early language development.

The pass rate on the seen question hit 97% and the marks on it were higher across the board with 16% on distinction compared to 7 to 10% at that level on the other questions.

The overall pass rate was 87% which implies that those that failed were largely confined to those that left the exam early and who hadn’t answered three questions. Although that might sound to some non-OU folk like it’s just a matter of sticking through to the end, the OU system is designed to weed people out as early as possible so you’d expect a fairly high pass rate in exams.

Finally, the big numbers on the psychology courses mean that there will be over 200 people doing the resit in April compared to around 500 for a typical normal exam in other subjects. Since the seen question for April is the same as it was in October, it’s unlikely that there’ll be much discussion as to how to go about answering it in forums or blogs though with the 97% pass rate on it that shouldn’t be an issue.

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The exam result wasn’t supposed to be in until Friday but the scary message “course result” was there this evening. Somehow, no matter how confident you are, course results are always something of an unknown quantity and therefore scary.

As it turned out, I did even better than I was expecting to and slightly better than I’d been doing in the assignments which is exactly what’s been happening for the last few years.

Also on the OU front, the course texts for the Astronomy course (S282) arrived this morning. Although I’d really like to get going on that I’m going to need to get at least the cardiology course out of the way first I think.

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