Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

One of the basic tenets of the new politic of Northern Ireland that the various institutions were set up to encourage was the removal of religious bigotry and now we find that the Minister for Culture and Leisure has weighed in with the most extreme version of it that I’ve seen in a long time.

What he took upon himself was to write a letter suggesting (which, from the government minister in charge means essentially ordering) the Ulster Museum to incorporate creationism into its various displays. Not as a religious belief mind you, but as scientific fact (hence his referring to it as creationism rather than Christian belief).

Now, I don’t see that representing the influence of Christian (and Viking and Pagan) beliefs on the social development of Ulster as a problem. After all, there are significant Pagan burial grounds all over the place and we’re almost knee deep in Christian churches so obviously there’s been significant influence on the social development of the country over many centuries. In fact, those influences are shown at various points in the museum; the Christian ones aren’t so obvious as they’re so deeply ingrained in the culture.

What is wrong is to show the pseudo-science (false science to be truthful) that is creationism. This puts forward the notion that everything was created about 6000 years ago which is something of a problem as some of the exhibits in the museum are somewhat older than that. Millions of years older in many cases and billions of years older in some cases. Even the Egyptian exhibit would cause some issues.

The basic problem with his entire belief system is that it starts from the premise that evolution is only a theory. The problem is that there’s whole raft of science behind it which would need to be very wrong for it not to be right. For example, if the carbon dating used to date the fossils (millions of years old) is fundamentally wrong then it means that a number of fundamental physical theories are also wrong which would be a bit of a problem as some of them are required to control the operation of things like nuclear power stations. Similarly, it would mean that some fundamental principles behind biology are wrong and that’s a problem as some of those things that support evolution in biology are also used to create new vaccines. Creationism also has to deal with the “small” problem that for the first time man has created a life form that never existed before; that creation relies on using a number of those theories which support evolution.

But what about the other religions? If one is to be (incorrectly) represented then shouldn’t others be given equal treatment too? Nelson McCausland shouldn’t be permitted to try and impose his own fundamentalist Christian beliefs and should be considering his resignation speech this evening.

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!