Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

Last year in a fit of enthusiasm I managed to sign up for both my first ever biology course and its sort-of associated residential.

As expected, the human biology course was both heavy going parts and thoroughly interesting right through. Having said that, it’s with some trepidation that I approach the revision for the upcoming exam in June: there’s a LOT of revision to be done in what seems to be an awfully short amount of time.

However, it’s now into the initial stages of the sort-of associated residential. I say sort-of because it’s associated with three separate courses (S204, SK277 and SD226) of which I’ve only done one so far and had intended to be in the midst of another one as I write this though I’ll not be doing it for another year or perhaps two on the current plans. The net effect of that is that I need to go over more of the background material than is ideal but, so far, that seems remarkably doable as has all of the biology so far.

Slightly unusually, the website is open before the paper versions of the documents have arrived which has let me get an initial look at them. There’s not really that much: the usual course-team letter, the introductory booklet and a course guide which also contains the background science required of the course. That last one is so comprehensive that I’d say it would be possible to come to this course without having done any of the three related biology courses though obviously you’d need to work that much harder if you did that.

Assessment-wise, it seems easy enough from this vantage point with the usual attendance requirement, marks on two mid-week presentations and a short (1000 word) write-up after the course which collectively seem very doable at this point. Total time required is supposed to be 10 hours going over the preparatory information, the week itself and about 10 hours doing the write-up following the course.

Because of the mix of associated courses, there’s a corresponding mix of experiments to be done over the week. They’re split into three separate themes: regulation and control (aimed at the human biology people), energy (aimed more generally at animals I think but I’ve not read that yet) and plants and carbon dioxide (obviously aimed at plants). All look to be very interesting at this point and that’s a view that seems to be reflected in all the course comments from previous students.

The only problem is that this course plus the human biology one are too darned interesting! That’s created a real dilemma for me in that I was originally intending to be doing a physics degree and, so far, I’m finding the biology both fascinating (much more so than the physics at this point) and a whole lot more doable than I had ever imagined it would be. That fascinating+doable combo has me thinking that perhaps I should jump ship and do the biology degree now. Snag is that with the withdrawal of the named science degrees by the OU, a choice to do that at this point basically rules out the possibility of doing a physics degree later on (though the courses would potentially remain available).

I’d both the astronomy and human biology assignments back in the same post yesterday.

As it’s the first of the astronomy assignments I’d really no idea what to expect. It’s been a long, long time since I did any kind of physics course so I wasn’t quite sure how best to approach it all. What I did was take on board the comments from the previous biology assignments which certainly seemed to have helped some in that the mark came out at 79% which is a nice start for sure.

Funnily enough, the biology weighed in at 74% though I suppose a slightly lower mark isn’t a great surprise in that it was the last TMA I did after some four weeks solid of doing them so I was a bit worn out with them all.

What was interesting was that the astronomy assignment was much more difficult to do than the biology ones have been. Since I have quite a background in physics/astronomy I was expecting that the astronomy assignments would be fairly easy going in comparison to the biology ones yet, to date, the reverse has been the case. Oddly, I’m finding the biology course much more interesting to do as well.

Since there’s only one biology assignment to be done the assessment calculator is at it’s most interesting in respect of “substitution” scores. It turns out that even if I don’t do that final one I would pick up 56% overall on the assignments which isn’t bad although doing the final assignment should raise that to something in the 70s. As always, I still wonder how “real” the assignment marks are at this point ie will my exam mark reflect the marks I’ve received in the assignments? In recent years, the exam mark has ended up within a few percent of the TMA average (previously there used to be quite a difference) so that’s reassuring though this’ll be the first science exam I’ve done for many years.

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.

Due to a peculiar combination of circumstances, I find myself doing four courses simultaneously at the moment which doesn’t seem like an overly good idea on the face of it.

However, whilst I’m now at the “worst” of it with three assignments due over a two week period about a month from now, it doesn’t seem that bad in practice. That’s down to planning (or “panicking early” as some would say) in that I’m running more than a month ahead with all but one of the course texts and have, in principle, a couple of weeks slack to play with if need be.

What’s taking a surprising amount of time is the cardiology course which, as a level one 15 point course, should be taking the least. The final assignment for that looks like it’ll take getting on for twice the time that the comparable assignments in the two level two 30 point courses will take. That’s not so surprising with hindsight in some ways though: 15 point courses aren’t long 10 pointers but 30 point courses done over half the time which in turn means that I’m effectively doing 100 points worth of courses right now.

Still, one of the four finishes next month and another the month afterwards so I’ll be back to a normal workload for a while.

Although I’ve just got the second human biology assignment back that’s enough to get me over the pass mark. Well, apart from the exam that is.

Since I don’t now need to submit any more assignments (there are two to go) any that I do submit can only serve to increase the overall mark which is a nice place to be in. If nothing else, it removes any assignment pressure that there has been to date.

That’s not to say that I won’t be working to improve the mark in the last couple of assignments. The marks have been good but not evenly distributed amongst the various sections of the assignments which means that there’s a lot of marks still to be had and, seemingly, the majority of them relatively easily since I’ve been doing rather well in what’s arguably the hardest question category and not so well in the one that should be easiest.

I’ll have to get going on the next assignment this week as otherwise I’ve assignments for three separate courses due in the third week of March which is a pile-up that I’d much rather avoid.