Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

Just one more full day of revision to go and the exam will be upon me.

The chemistry course has been something of an interesting journey for me. It began just a week or so after the S204 (biology) exam so the first few weeks went in a bit of a blur as I recovered from that. The next few months ran alongside a full-time computer course which ate up a lot of the time that ordinarily would have been available for study and then it was on to the new job which ate up even more time. Not a good recipe for great performance on the course and the marks tracked the availability of time for the course pretty well ie not great after the first assignment. Funnily enough, now that I’ve had a fairly good run at the revision, I feel reasonably confident about the exam (the confidence could dissipate quite quickly on Tuesday morning though!).

I began the revision a few weeks ago based on the “bookmarks” and chapter summaries that the course team very helpfully pulled out. Together those run to 152 pages which is fairly comparable with the amount on S204 if you take into account the different font size. The information density is so high that it takes ages to read through and I wish I’d started a few weeks earlier as my target of a book’s worth per day made for a very hard slog at times.

Stage two was based around the past papers and two tutorials relating to those. Whilst in S204 there were chunks of the books classed as optional, in S205 the options are enshrined on the paper itself. As usual, the short questions are from the entire course but since it’s 8 from 12 you can effectively omit one or possibly two books and still do quite well. I find that in practice I’m able to pick 6 to 8 questions that I can do very well from each of the past papers which equates to around 25% to 30% of the overall marks for the paper ie in principle I should almost have passed just on the short questions.

The longer questions are divided up into three sections and you pick 1 from 3 in each of those sections. The first section seems the easiest with substitution/elimination and retrosynthetic analysis that seem fairly doable in each of the papers. The second section has kinetics and spectroscopy which generally seem quite doable alongside orbitals and bonding which don’t so a reasonable selection again. The final section seems the most difficult potentially with a VSEPR question that can be all over the place, a Born-Haber cycle that’s mostly doable and what could very much be a nightmare book 9 question. Still, hopefully with 25% in the bank from the short questions I won’t need a massive amount from the longer ones to achieve a pass.

I’m planning on going over my one page of notes tomorrow and perhaps to look in more detail at the crystals book and, of course, there’s the exam bag to be packed.

This year the bag will be a lot more packed than usual. There’s the normal pens, pencil, spare pen and pencil, ruler, calculator, spare calculator (yes, I know, paranoid), wine gums (I’m expecting a number of “wine gum moments” for this exam), Lucozade and passport (you need photo ID for the exam). To that are added the molecular model kit (although I’ve yet to see a question that required it) and the data book. Since I have them from the S204 exam, I’ll likely take along the coloured pencils and drawing kit: I’m sure that some day I’ll do an exam where I’ll use them.

As with the S204 exam, there’s no rest period afterwards as I’ve to get the CMAs for both the residentials done before the end of the month and get back into the SD329 reading as there’s an assignment for it due just after I get back from the residentials.

With starting the new job the week before Easter, this is my first week of work holidays in over eight years!

As we normally do, it was off to Portrush on Easter Monday. Usually, there’s a mass of traffic along the way, a traffic jam a mile or two long going into the town, pretty much nowhere to park, wall to wall crowds everywhere regardless of the weather and no money in the cash machines. This year the traffic seemed a bit light on the way up, there was no traffic jam at all, loads of parking spots even quite close into the town, hardly any crowds and money in the cash machines even in the late afternoon as we were leaving. We didn’t even have to queue in the café and there was next to no queuing in Barry’s either. Methinks that Portrush is going to have a tough time financially if they can’t fill up even on Easter Monday.

Ongoing throughout the holiday has been the assignment for SD329 a biology cum psychology course that runs through to October. Although it was very much a last minute thing, it was a much easier assignment than the chemistry one which I’ve been ruminating over for weeks. I wasn’t too keen on the breakdown of every section of every question into a specific word count but it did prompt me to write a little more on some questions than I otherwise would have done which, hopefully, will improve the marks. Anyway, it’s off so it’s just the final chemistry question to complete tomorrow.

I came across a neat site which converts any website into an Android application so I’ve put on four trial ones. They look fine on the ASUS tablet but I’ll need to rejig the style sheet a bit to tidy up their appearance on Android phones. I may need to get myself an Android phone to really try them out too. No downloads as yet but then they’ve only been on a couple of days.

The materials for the Infectious Disease course arrived yesterday. No big surprises there as I picked up a copy of the pre-course briefing last year. I’ll have to get going on reading it properly soon as I want to get that well underway before I need to start the chemistry revision and indeed the pre-course work for the chemistry summer school for that matter. Oh, and the two assignments that’ll fall due in the midst of that revision time too. It’s going to be a hectic time for me in May and June.

I’ve managed to pile in a massive amount of stuff into the first couple of months of the year, hence lack of updates on the blog.

To begin with, the Chemistry course assignments have proved to be both more time consuming and less rewarding than expected. That’s had be starting to rethink the possibility of future chemistry courses. Essentially, I’m shelving them for the moment apart from the residential that’s already booked. That in turn frees up a chunk of time in the coming year so I might do the bio/psych course in October.

The Autism course is barely noticeable in terms of time required. Just this evening I finished the final iCMA with a 100% score in under 10 minutes and without even glancing at the book. All being well the EMA will be equally easy.

I thought I was behind with the signals & perception course but it turns out that I was running at a 60 point rate for a 30 point course so I’m well ahead of the official timetable.

The web design course being fairly full-time has forced me to rejig the times that I do the OU courses and it’s just as well that the workload this year was lower than last year or I’d have had to drop something I think.

The first fruits of the web design course are a radical update of the listings sites producing a major improvement in the look and feel of OurBedAndBreakfasts.com, OurHolidayRentalHomes.com and WholeEarthGuide.com . I’m hoping to double the number of properties listed over the course of the coming 18 months or so and as step one of that I’ve a bunch of adwords campaigns running. Upcoming tasks include refining the adwords campaigns, getting the B&B marketing guide assembled into book form and increasing the coverage of the Whole Earth guide which’ll keep me busy for the next month or two I expect.

As usual, the Open University results were in earlier than planned so yesterday I found out that I’d passed S204 and was well clear of 40% too.

Just as well really as there’s no way that I’d have been able to fit in even more revision for the resit in April. From the 297 students around 50 will be eligible for a resit though I suspect that there will be a good deal fewer than that who will actually do it as the revision is something of a nightmare in terms of sheer volume and indeed difficulty in parts too.

It looked like it was a little harder than usual as only 2% picked up a distinction rather than the usual 10% for exams generally.

This morning saw the final S204 exam as it’s being replaced by S294 from next year plus another course a year or two later.

As usual the two short answer questions were all over the place requiring quite a comprehensive knowledge of the course contents to be able to fully answer 12 from the 18 on offer. Individually each of them seemed relatively easy but this being the section of the exam that required you to show you’d a good overall grasp of the course, you needed pretty detailed knowledge for a fair number of them. So, yes, they were easy but only if you had put an awful lot of time into learning the course content.

The three data handling questions didn’t require a great deal of specific biological knowledge and seemed fairly easy to do. That said, a broad knowledge of the course content obviously helped here.

I suspect that some people may have come unstuck on the essay questions. Some were fairly broad but there seemed to be a lot of detail required for some of them too.

Overall, on my pessimistic estimate I seem to be on a fairly safe pass so not a bad exam in the end.