Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category

Now that I’ve realised that I can use some of the short courses to bulk up the life sciences degree to the 360 points, it opens up a whole range of options for the October to June slot for the next two or three years.

Since it’s now basically a free choice in October I could include the World Archaeology course which I’ve been wanting to do for a while now and with its new November start date it’s looking very doable.

A second series of options relate to the psychology degree. I’d been planning on skipping level one altogether for that but as I won’t finish it before 2015 I’ll have to include both Discovering Psychology (no exam) and Introducing Health Sciences (a life sciences course obviously). In fact, postponing S205 gives me both October 2011 and October 2012 as slots for those.

Finally, there’s Planetary science and the search for life which would complete my Certificate in Astronomy and Planetary Science.

I don’t need to decide between them ’til after Easter which is handy as it’ll give me enough time to see how the certificate in web applications courses run alongside larger courses. At the moment I think my front runner would be the world archaeology course probably followed by the planetary science one the following year.

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.

Now that I’ve come across the overall results for ED209 I’m finding that they’re quite fascinating reading.

For a start, despite everyone knowing about one of the questions in advance, 7 people didn’t answer it!

As expected, most people did the questions on the first two books as the third was a) perceived as harder than the other two and b) much thicker than them. In fact, over twice the number did the other questions and a mere 15% did the question on categorisation and early language development.

The pass rate on the seen question hit 97% and the marks on it were higher across the board with 16% on distinction compared to 7 to 10% at that level on the other questions.

The overall pass rate was 87% which implies that those that failed were largely confined to those that left the exam early and who hadn’t answered three questions. Although that might sound to some non-OU folk like it’s just a matter of sticking through to the end, the OU system is designed to weed people out as early as possible so you’d expect a fairly high pass rate in exams.

Finally, the big numbers on the psychology courses mean that there will be over 200 people doing the resit in April compared to around 500 for a typical normal exam in other subjects. Since the seen question for April is the same as it was in October, it’s unlikely that there’ll be much discussion as to how to go about answering it in forums or blogs though with the 97% pass rate on it that shouldn’t be an issue.

The exam result wasn’t supposed to be in until Friday but the scary message “course result” was there this evening. Somehow, no matter how confident you are, course results are always something of an unknown quantity and therefore scary.

As it turned out, I did even better than I was expecting to and slightly better than I’d been doing in the assignments which is exactly what’s been happening for the last few years.

Also on the OU front, the course texts for the Astronomy course (S282) arrived this morning. Although I’d really like to get going on that I’m going to need to get at least the cardiology course out of the way first I think.

Throughout the course everyone seemed to be saying that there was “an awful lot of course” in ED209 but I found that I really didn’t notice that so much until the time came for revision.

Since it’s a research led course you need to try and memorise an enormous number of names of researchers so that you can quote them in the exam. If you were trying to revise the entire course that would equate to several dozen names at least but by that point very few people seemed to even attempt to revise the entire course as it seemed to be an impossible task.

Thus, people selected what they had to revise. In principle that was a fairly easy thing to do in that a guiding principle is that you’re only examined on a topic once. So you could eliminate almost a dozen chapters throughout the three books. However, even that turned out to be problematical as one of the assignment topics turned up on the exam paper thus removing a choice for a lot of people. In fact, this seems to have resulted in almost everyone ignoring the “disturbing behaviour” question and going with the “gender development” one if they were revising book 2.

The structure of the exam paper introduces further complications. There’s one “seen question” that you need to research before the exam and write out during it which is much more difficult than it first appears. The research isn’t so bad but few people these days know how much they could write in an hour and even fewer know how much they could write in an hour under exam conditions. Besides, you basically need to memorise that essay which isn’t that easy either.

Next you need to choose two questions. The questions on offer are a selection of two from each book of the course and you need to answer one question from each book. Thus a lot of people only revised two books and limited themselves somewhat during the exam. Since the third book was the largest and most complex, many people chose from the first two books. This would have been fine but since people were generally limiting the chapters within each book to study and eliminating those chapters already covered by an assignment they had the complication that one of the assignment topics was on the exam paper thus an awful lot of people answered the “gender development” question.

The effect of all this is that getting on for 20% of our merry band didn’t turn up for the exam and around 10% left within the first hour. One glance at the paper was enough for one person and she left after about a minute. Somehow that doesn’t seem right. Yes, people don’t turn up and people leave early in all exams but I’ve never seen it happening in anything like the numbers in ED209.

Overall, the impression is that ED209 is much harder than even the level 3 psychology courses which doesn’t seem right.