Foreign Perspectives

Chemistry assignments always take me ages to do, so I thought it best to make an early start on the end of module assignment and avoid last minute rushes.

Since the external examiner required that the assignment was issues three weeks before the cut-off date, that meant that it turned up on March 21st this year with the cut-off date being April 10th. So, three weekends to work on it as I keep weekends for assignments.

At nine questions, it was pretty much the same as a normal assignment, albeit with more questions and covering the entire course pretty much in sequence. So there were three questions on the first, mainly biology, book, around 6 or 7 from the second, mainly chemistry, book and several from sections of the course presented as separate texts (i.e. unit 4 and the McMurray book extracts).

In practice, finding the information to answer some of the questions proved rather time-consuming as there’s no overall course index and unit 4 and the McMurray extracts are easy to forget about after you’ve worked through them. So this year one particularly easy question took a number of people ages to find the relevant information and some were even talking about not answering it at all.

Overall, it covered the course quite thoroughly and helped what was previously fairly unconnected information to make sense as a whole. Unfortunately, as this is an examinable component we won’t get any feedback on our answers which seems a shame as it’s the one piece of work where the course really came together.