Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

At the end of next week I’m off to the biology residential in Nottingham so should be sort-of busy doing stuff in preparation for that and probably in preparation for the things that I’ll not be doing whilst I’m there or rather not here.

However, the unexpectedly easy astronomy assignment has left me somewhat at a loose end. Not entirely mind you as there are a heap of administration type things that there just wasn’t the time to move on with over the last month or so with all the end of school year things to be done. Still, it does mean a slight lull in activity on the OU front.

There’s a fair amount of reading that doesn’t have to be done before the residential but I’ll be aiming to at least skim over it over the next week or so.

At the moment it looks like the hardest pre-course task will be getting everything packed into one carry-on bag under 10kg. Well, under 9kg as they always come back with more stuff from a course than you arrived with. So far, I’ve a white coat, baby computer, calculator and massive lab book that need to be taken which is getting on for half of the baggage allowance!

For a change, I had quite a decent revision plan worked out for this exam. That’s largely thanks to the advice sent out by the course team a month or two before the exam which enabled quite well targeted revision. That in turn made for a more comfortable exam than it would have been otherwise.

Of course, that’s not to say that the revision was perfect as several of the short questions showed up limitations in this revision strategy in that I’d not covered their topics in sufficient detail to answer them nearly as well as I’d have liked to. Still, overall I think I did quite well on the exam and amazingly well considering that a year ago I’d not done any biology at all.

The problem with an exam is that there’s quite a long period working up to it both in terms of the course time and the more intense revision period just prior to the exam. That leaves me at least all hyped up and it was two full days after the exam before I’d gotten back to normal and back into working on the courses that are still running on for me.

Which has me wondering how long it’ll take me to wind down from the S204 + S320 combo exam in October next year. Still, at least after their exams I’ll have several months of a break.

As it turned out, the last minute revision wasn’t really required with the exception of a brief look at the diagram of the digestion system.

Unexpectedly, the digestion question was pretty much  a repeat of the July 2006 question “Write an essay that describes the process of digestion involved in consuming a cheese and tomato sandwich.” replacing “cheese” with “egg” and adding “absorption”. The endocrine, circulation and stress essays were unexpectedly general and looked easy enough to do.

The data handling was loosely based on a stress experiment although you didn’t need to know anything about stress to do it. Unexpectedly again there was a graph to be drawn which represented 1/3rd of the marks for that question. I think it’s fairly safe to say that most people will get over 20 out of the possible 30 marks for it so in theory even 10 out of 30 for the essay plus a couple of short answer questions would be enough for a pass.

The short questions were all over the place as expected. First off was a hard core chemistry question was seemed not to have been a good start for most people. Nobody seemed to have gotten the circle of Willis one in my group and there was another one which I suspect my mark will be close to zero. Other than those two the rest were quite a reasonable mix and largely answerable from my “27 page” summary although not entirely as it turned out (no mention of the circle of Willis for instance, no mention of the chemistry angle either). There was at least one repeat from previous years (advice to a pregnant friend re smoking to have a smaller size baby and easier birth) and one or two others looked kind of familiar so it’s definitely worthwhile looking at past papers for this one.

Strategy-wise I took a brief look at the essay questions first before taking a run through all of the short questions and scribbling out a few keywords that struck me. That worked out really well as I managed to answer a few more of the short questions than I had originally expected to be able to answer as a couple of things came to me whilst I was doing the essay and data handling question. It also gave me a lot of time to do the short question as the essay only took 45 minutes or so and the data handling was about the same.

Quite oddly I felt very comfortable with this exam which is certainly a major change from being all stressed out (as was everyone) with last years Child Development course. Marks-wise I have a pessimistic estimate of 60 but didn’t have enough time to do my optimistic estimate this time (the last few of the short questions took lots of thinking time).

I thought the results for the Understanding cardiovascular diseases and Maths for science weren’t to be out until towards the end of this month so it was a nice surprise to see the Your result for … is now available messages in the inbox this afternoon.

They’re both level one courses so they’re just pass/fail rather than coming with a grading. In both cases there’s supposed to be more information about the course result arriving in the post in a couple of months time.

The cardiovascular course is one of the OU’s medical style courses with heaps of medical terminology to pick up quite early on in the course. It’s also exclusively online tutoring which I could have done with for this particular course but the promised weekly tutorials only ran for two weeks which was a real shame as they were the kind of style which made you think deeper about the course. Nothing at all really on the Maths for science course as it’s one of the short science courses which only offer you a forum to ask questions on although having said that, it’s much more than was on offer the last time I did a science short course.

Anyway that’s another 25 points in the bag for the degree.

One of the biggest problems with planning out a science degree with the Open University at the moment is that they’re in the process of completely revamping the entire science degree programme which in turn means that expiry dates for courses have been changing and start dates for new courses are being juggled too.

At the simplest level they’re basically cancelling all but one of the science summer schools with the final year for the level 2 schools being 2011 and 2012 for the level 3 schools. That’s caused a whole bunch of upheaval in degree schedules for many people who want a named science degree (BSc physical sciences, BSc life sciences, etc.). Since for those named degrees you generally need one L2 and two L3 summer schools there’s going to be something of a fire-sale atmosphere around the October booking time this year and next.

Next, there’s the problem that in a number of degree programmes there’s a fair number of courses expiring in 2011 and 2012. Normally, these courses would be replaced with an updated version but that’s not happening this time around. Thus the excellent S320 Infectious Disease course has one final run in 2011 and the landmark S204 biology course also finishes in 2011. For infectious diseases, it’s the end of the road with no replacement in prospect but even the main biology course isn’t getting fully replaced and instead there’s only going to be a shorter course covering part of the ground.

Oddly there’s been a lot of development around some areas, notably biology which has acquired four 15 point biology cum medical courses (which, if the cardiology course is anything to go by, are excellent).

However, with all the upheaval recently, hardly a month has gone by without me having to rejig my plans for the next couple of years.