Foreign Perspectives

Archive for May, 2010

The SK277 exam is a bit of a ragbag collection of question types which means that thinking about how to approach the exam on the day is likely to make the time on the day that little bit more effective.

The key thing that makes this possible is that you can answer the questions in any order so long as you clearly indicate what question you’re answering as you go along. In fact, you could even write the essay paragraphs in a random order so long as you included an index as to what order to read the paragraphs (I wouldn’t recommend this though as it seems sure to put the marker in a bad mood!).

As those doing this exam will know by now there are four fairly distinct essay questions and we know what chapters of the books that these are based on. Therefore, you’ll be best prepared to answer the essay question. Some people are talking about preparing an essay ahead of time although personally I generally don’t go that far and in this case, unless you’re doing the digestion essay, there seems to be too many potential questions that could be asked. If you are doing the digestion essay it might be worth at least doing a very complete essay plan though obviously you’d need to be able to tailor that on the day depending on whether it was a hamburger, or veggie burger or whatever passing through. You have about an hour to answer this for 30% of the total marks. It’s probably best to start with the essay as there’s a lot of writing to be done for it, you’ll be more relaxed about it because you know the topic area and you’ll be at your best initially. Note that as with the TMA essays there are easy marks to be had in terms of an essay plan (10%?), a decent structure (15%) and diagrams (10%?). Do not stroke out the essay plan!  If you’re doing SXR270, the background reading on circulation is helpful for the circulation essay.

Second up should probably be the data handling question. You’ve an hour or so for this but the implication from the course team is that it’s likely to take much less so you might complete it in 40 minutes or so. The downside is that this is pretty much an unknown quantity although you will have done similar things in the four TMAs so it should be doable. It’s 30% of the total. If they ask for a graph that’s some very easy marks (up to around 30% of the total).

Finally, there’s the short-answer section. You’ve eight questions worth 5% each but chances are you’ll not be able to do all parts of all of them. That in itself is a very good reason to leave them ’til last as it could be somewhat demotivating to find that you had to skip a couple of questions altogether. Don’t worry if that happens though as skipping a question means dropping 5% so it’s not a disaster. Possibly more significant is the time allocation: you have at most 7 minutes per question before you start eating into the time for the other questions; doing them last avoids that issue altogether. Revising for these seems quite hard to me and to make it a little more doable I’ve extracted all the section summaries into one bumper summary of 27 pages. Sounds short? It may be short but it’s very information rich so it takes ages to read. Sorry, no, I can’t put that on the website ‘cos it’s entirely OU copyright. Don’t forget that these are short answer questions: you’re not going to be able to write more than three or four sentences in your 7 minutes ie the answers required are very basic and to the point.

Now that the exam is worryingly close, I’m finally getting around to doing a lot of the revision that I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

The first part of the exam consists of eight short questions which should take about an hour to answer thus less than 8 minutes a question or, in reality, more like 5 by the time you subtract thinking time. For this part the course team advice is to check the glossary terms for each book and the learning outcomes for each chapter, read the section summaries and attempt the Questions at the end of each chapter. So, what I’ve been doing is going through the PDFs to create a single document containing just the learning outcomes and the section summaries. I tried this out last night against the specimen exam paper and there appears to be sufficient information in my super-summary to answer just about all of them. Collectively they’re 40% of the paper or 5% each.

Part 2 is a data handling question and aside from looking over the TMA comments on that type of question there’s not a whole lot of preparation that you can do for this. This gets 30% of the marks.

Finally, there’s the essay questions which are on Book 1, Chapter 4: Digestion and absorption of nutrients, Book 2, Chapter 3: The endocrine system, Book 3, Chapter 2: Circulation and finally Book 4, Chapter 3: Stress. For these I’m running up my own notes (digestion and stress are done, endocrine and circulation being done possibly by the weekend). There are notes on the latter three on the course forum and I’ve my own notes on the digestion system published here already (the others will follow during the coming week). This counts for 30%.

You only need to do one of the essays. Whilst in theory you could revise for only one, two seems safer to me and I’ll be doing digestion (because we’ve already done a TMA on it), circulation (because I did the cardiovascular diseases [SK121] course earlier this year) and stress because it looks easy to do. The endocrine system currently looks pretty complicated to me but I’ll see after I’ve done the notes.

Once I’ve completed the bumper summary and the chapter notes I’ll be working through both of them and seeing if I can answer the end of chapter questions and the past paper ones. I’m not planning on writing out complete answers as such though as that’s just too time consuming.

One of the problems with the paperless age is that you don’t have a little piece of paper to prove that you did whatever you said you did.

Despite having left France at the start of 2009 to live in Northern Ireland again, we still have problems with both tax and social services administrations. Today it was time to tackle offices in two different countries once more.

First off was the French taxation people who basically seem to have the view that nobody leaves France and that even if they do, the rest of the world is basically just an extension of France. I came across this several years ago when someone posted a question about it on one of the French forums. Basically her problem was that she had left France almost a year before, her post redirection service was running out and several French departments wouldn’t accept that she’d left so were therefore continuing to send her assorted bills (and benefit payments). As it turned out, the only proof that she had really left which would be accepted was a Certificate de Residence from her mairie. Unfortunately, there aren’t any mairies outside France the the closest equivalent (ie her local council) had no such document that they could give her. In the end, she had to just let the redirection service run out and leave the various departments to work it out for themselves.

I’m merely at the first off-ramp from that particular road at the moment so today it was the turn of the French taxation people to have another form sent back to them pointing out that I haven’t lived there for well over a year now. Somehow I don’t think they’ll take any notice of that as they didn’t last year but I guess it’ll be out of my hands soon as my own redirection service is running out.

On the other side of the fence, getting fully into the UK system is proving to be equally difficult. This time last year the health service were refusing to believe that we intended to live here and were merely health tourists. Quite how one proves one’s intent to live somewhere (which is what they wanted us to do) is still beyond me but we wore them down in the end. Child benefit was particularly difficult and instead of the “couple of weeks” quoted initially it turned out to be closer to four months. The particular problem with that is that you need the Child Benefit number for other forms and the lack of it complicates life no end. The other little problem is that we just couldn’t work out a way to tell the French child benefit equivalent that we’d left and they should stop paying us and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still paying us.

At the moment, we’re working on the Child Tax Credit people who said last October that they couldn’t process our claim without a Child Benefit number, then they said almost two months ago when we finally could give them the Child Benefit number that it would take a “couple of weeks or so” to pay. Now they say they’ve no record at all of the claim!

Still, it’s nice to see European harmonisation of the taxation and social security systems. It would have been better to harmonise upwards in quality but I guess you can’t have everything.

Much as most people like their summer holidays and many of those expect to be flying to somewhere in Spain, there’s major uncertainty this year thanks to the Icelandic volcano.

So what should you do?

The most reliable approach is to forget about any holidays requiring air travel in the northern hemisphere. In practical terms that will limit the number of places that you can consider quite considerably unless you’re prepared to devote quite a lot of your holiday time to travelling. Typically, from England you wouldn’t be able to go much further south than northern Spain or much further east than Switzerland with two days travelling in each direction, drop that to one day and you’re largely limited to northern France, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and, of course, somewhere in the UK.

If that doesn’t suit, and you really must go by air then assembling your own holiday by booking your flights and accommodation separately is going to require good holiday insurance that definitely covers volcano problems. Whilst the airlines might be required to be reasonable about paying for accommodation, those laws don’t extend to accommodation and you could easily find yourself paying for accommodation that you can’t get to. Alternatively, if you book a package deal you should be covered for problems. Either way, do bear in mind that a cancellation can leave you either stranded at home (less costly obviously) or at your destination and if it’s the latter you need to budget for a lot of potential extra expenses ie don’t aim to spend down to the last penny on your day of departure.

Of course, the biggest plus of booking a holiday involving flights is that it’s quite likely to be considerably cheaper all-round in that there should be a whole lot fewer people booking such holidays this year which means a lot of surplus accommodation.

Differences in the questions and the interpretations of the answers on websites seems to be increasingly common lately.

At the top of the annoyances list is the bank which, as part of their security set up, asks what is your mother’s first name yet when asking you to confirm your security details asks what was your mother’s maiden name which, of course, is a completely different question and with a different answer.

Even more insidious is Facebook as I’ve just found out. I generally get around to looking at it once every couple of months so just got around to setting up a bit more of my profile on a whim a few weeks ago. One thing I noticed was that you can now say you’re in a relationship with somebody that’s on Facebook. The options under that are extremely limited for the complicated lives that people lead these days and basically look like they’ve been written back in the 1950s. Anyway, the only one that seemed to match up me and Wendy was “in a relationship”. Snag is that at the other end it asked Wendy to confirm that she was my girlfriend which doesn’t really equate to “in a relationship” to me and doesn’t really come close to describing said relationship seeing as James is now 8 and we’ve been together for getting on for 10 years.

Can’t people sort out these two-place questions?