Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

In the end I managed to get 1930 words for the second part though it doesn’t seem to be an overly lax word count for that part. That leaves a bit of a break before the client side (TT281) course starts at the end of January.

I’m expecting to do rather more work for TT281 as I’ve much less of a background in client side stuff and, of course, there’s the small matter of the overlap with both the tail end of A251 and the start of S204.

The most annoying part of TT280 (and the rest of the TT courses) is that the course material is drip-fed week by week so you couldn’t get any more than a few weeks ahead. Whilst I generally don’t run massively ahead of the course schedule, it was annoying to have to go to the website to download the course guide for each week: normally I get that done in the first week of the course. The forums were a bit hyperactive at the start and it was several weeks into the course before they calmed down enough to keep any kind of handle on what was being talked about. It would be very easy to sink below the tide of messages and some people appeared to do just that.

Although it’s not possible to make direct comparisons between the figures from 2009, it is possible to make a few observations about the spread of those marks.

The breakdown in the Autumn 2009 Sesame gives the breakdown of grades 1 to 4 (the four pass grades) as 22.9%, 23.6%, 22.2% and 15.6% (thus 15.7% failed it, or, for the more optimistic, 84.3% passed it).

Because we only have the marks in part 1 (the multiple choice bit) and part 2 (the two short answer sections), it’s not possible to just add the figures we have together. However, since the grade ones in part 2 totalled 4% and grades 1 and 2 in part 2 totalled 20%, it seems sure that the overall spread of marks this year is substantially below that of 2009.

That an exam is particularly difficult or particularly easy in any given year shouldn’t matter as marks are generally “adjusted” on the basis that, on average, a given cohort of students should be similar to any other cohort and therefore should get similar marks hence the marks are generally adjusted. That doesn’t seem to have happened this year though.

Or maybe they have and something threw a spanner in the works? Like the very oddly distributed marks of question 16 perhaps?

It seemed at the time to be a difficult course to revise for and it proved to be quite difficult to do on the day too.

The multiple choice part was by far the easiest to do in practice with 60% of people picking up 70% (ie grade 1 or 2) on it and only 6% failing it.

The short answer questions show a dramatic drop in overall performance though. Although the individual question results don’t look too bad (50% in grade 1 or 2 in the two easiest questions, 25% on the two hardest in part 1), the overall mark for this section of the paper shows only 20% getting grade 1 or 2 and 25% failing it which means that a number of people didn’t answer the required number of questions.

By far the worst section was cosmology with question 15 on dark matter being a disaster for most people. Only 49% passed it and just 7% picked up a grade 1 or 2. Surprisingly, question 13 on Hubble classifications wasn’t much better with 52% passing it and 12% getting grade 1 or 2; I’m not sure why this happened as the question doesn’t look amazingly difficult but clearly an awful lot of people dropped marks all over the place on it.

Some individual questions proved to be surprisingly difficult and have a deceptively easy look to them. Question 10 on star properties felled 35% of those doing it and Question 12 on the end of life of stars proved to be difficult to do really well with although most people passed it. The Hubble classification question was a shock to me as it looks like it should be easy to do well with it yet few did and almost half failed it. Probably the oddest result is that of the final question on the universe though, with almost identical numbers of people in every percentile which implies that people generally did that last and just answered whatever they could. Quite a peculiar spread to the marks even so.

Answering the right number of questions is something that many people fell down on. Despite not overly great marks in individual questions the overall marks for the short answer section were lower than most individual questions which implies that people skipped questions altogether. You just can’t afford to do that on a difficult paper and it resulted in 25% of people failing that section. Thanks to the multiple choice section this equates to around 10% failing overall.

Rather a difficult subject to do well with and one that I’m glad I don’t have to repeat. Commiserations to the 40 or so people who will be resitting it.

The final TT280 result sneaked in without me noticing a few days ago.

Our merry band have been reduced by another 20 this time with the original 481 now down to 437. As before, almost everyone is in the 85-100% range with the marks and consequently have over 15% towards their final mark. You need to pass both the CMAs and the ECA so everyone still needs to clear 40% on the ECA rather than the 30% that they may think they need.

The ECA itself is a bit of a peculiar beast, consisting of a four page website, a 1000 word report for the client and a 2000 word technical report. Previous versions of the course appeared to have ran with a single combined report which makes more sense as there’s a lot of duplication between the two reports and going by the course descriptions, later courses in the web applications certificate only have one report.

The website itself is a doddle with the only hassle being that it must validate. Having said that, if you haven’t written any HTML before it would probably be a bit of an eye opener but in reality they only require a very simple website. I’m using the W3C’s Amaya program to run it up which handily validates everything as you write. That immediate validation is something of a pain at times but does avoid the grief of having to go through hundreds of validation errors later on.

The ECA is due next week which seems to have come around terribly quickly and despite me running three weeks ahead for most of the course I’ll only be submitting the ECA a few days early. That’s the problem in general with the TT courses: any slack you may build up is eaten up very quickly indeed.

This is a course that certainly doesn’t hang around to let you admire the view. With a cut-off date of December 3rd, it was marked on the 6th.

Considering that it was my first history course since way before the A-levels I’m quite pleased with the mark. Actually, I’d have been moderately pleased with it even if I’d been doing history classes all along so definitely a decent start to the course.

At the moment, I’m in the midst of doing the TT280 ECA which requires a major change in style from the archaeology. There’s a major difference in the time I’ve been taking to do it too. So far, in the second day of working on it I’ve almost half of it complete vs somewhat longer to so the archaeology TMA.

The plan is that I complete TT280 over the next week or so, closely followed by the final question for SK185 and then it’s on to the second A251 TMA which is on the factors affecting the emergence of cities. It’s more explicit on this one that Internet references are required (which probably lost me getting on for 10% on the first one as I only added one at the last minute). The 1500 words isn’t split into two parts this time though you still need to consider old and new world sites which makes it quite a tight word limit.

Although I’m over half way through the reading for the course I’m still not sure whether I like it or not. The massive amount of reading makes for a feeling of not seeing the wood for the trees a lot of the time and in some sections it felt very much like sites were being listed just for the sake of listing them rather than furthering the argument. That reading volume also means that it’s very hard to keep a handle on the big picture and to keep in mind the sequence of events happening over the course of thousands of years and in any one of a half dozen or so separate regions. On the other hand, it’s been a fascinating journey ranging from the earliest farming in Mesopotamia around 12,000 BC through to, so far, Chinese empires in the first millennium AD.

I suspect that in practice this really needs to be a full credit course as it often feels like you’re just skating over the surface. That seems particularly to be the case with the Chinese empires which are into the historical period and for which there is oodles of documented history. For example, Confucius was only given a page when there have been entire books written on his works.