Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

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.

As with all final tutorials the one yesterday was mainly centred around the exam.

For this course that exam consists of three very different types of questions which require three equally different approaches to revising for them and similarly different tactics in answering them. As always, good time management is important in both revision and on the day of the exam and it’s even more important when the exam paper is made up of totally different types of question.

Coming first on the day are eight short questions whilst last is a choice of one essay from four. Yesterday the consensus was that it was best to answer the essay first as that’s a relatively known quantity so should make for some settling time. The problem with that is that you need to be fairly strict in doing the essay within an hour or so as much of an over-run will cause problems for the rest of the exam. That potential for over-running the time is a big problem for some people: it’s very important to remember that the essay only counts for 30% of the marks so spending, say, 50% of the time on it is unlikely to be productive.

The analysis question is something of an unknown quantity. My thinking on it is that it should be done second basically because it’s the kind of question that you wouldn’t want to feel rushed over. There are likely to be a lot of easy marks to be had from it, notably on the graph if they ask for one as it can take up to 1/3rd of the total marks for the question. Don’t run over the hour on this either though!

Finally, the thinking seemed to be that the short questions should be done last. That’s basically because it would be very easy to over-run the time on this and it could be rather de-motivating if you found that you could only do 6 or 7 of the questions.

Revision should really be done in that order too I think although it’s not really possible to revise for the analysis question.

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.

I think I’m due a rest day after the intensive activity yesterday and today!

Somehow I managed to get it into my head that the astronomy assignment was due on the 19th and only found out late yesterday that it was due tomorrow. As it happens, I’ve actually been working on the assignment off and on for a few weeks so had answers to all the hard bits written out which “just” left those to be typed up and the 1600 word report on the solar luminosity experiment.

As it uses lots of symbols, the astronomy takes ages to type up so that pretty much filled the slots available yesterday. Today it was the turn of the report which I’d usually have done over several days but somehow I managed to get it finished in a few hours. Probably not my greatest work but at least it’s done.

What really surprised me was just how accurate the luminosity came out given that the experiment only used stuff that you’d find in your house. Granted it wasn’t nearly as accurate as you’d get with professional gear but when you’re using a normal house bulb, a piece of paper, a drop of oil and a ruler to work it out, it’s pretty amazing to come up with 7 x 10^26 W vs the real figure of just under 4 x 10^26 W.

Anyway, that leaves the way fairly clear for the biology revision. I’m well ahead on the astronomy reading so could drop that for a few weeks, the next astronomy assignment isn’t due ’til July 16th, I’ve almost completed the pre-reading for the biology summer school and I’m fairly rattling through the planetary science course with that assignment not due ’til the end of July. Which seems to rule out excuses for not doing the biology revision!