Getting going on the biology (S204) revision
September 18th, 2011 | 
Author: The biggest problem with S204 isn’t the difficulty of the course but rather the sheer volume of material within it. For a start there’s the 1925 pages of course texts and 250-odd pages of study guide. Add to that there’s a whole heap of stuff on the two DVDs ranging from videos, through a massive living organism database to several computer based activities. Even my revision notes are currently sitting at 80 pages worth!
A consequence of this is that selecting what you’ll revise is essential. To that end the course team identify a number of sections of one of the books that won’t be examined which knocks over 100 pages off and is more helpful than that might appear as they’re among the most complex of chapters. Additionally they identify core and advanced chapters in the second half of the course: you select two from animals, microbes and plants to specialise in. That’s not nearly so useful as whilst the “advanced” chapters amount to around another 100 pages or so, they only count for 12% of the exam marks ie it’s probably not worth bothering about any of the advanced chapters at all if you’re pushed for time. Finally, they identify the five chapters from which the essay question will be taken (thus you only need to revise one or perhaps two of those). That however still leaves a massive amount of course to revise.
My current strategy is to go through my notes, leafing through the corresponding books in parallel. Whilst doing that I’m adding in any key diagrams that I come across and going through the essay chapters in much more detail to beef up my notes on those. That’s taking a surprising amount of time and looks like it could require three days or perhaps four per book so I’m going to need to speed that up a bit as there ain’t that many days left before the exam.
Finally, there’s all the exam tips things that accumulate and particularly so as we didn’t get the final in-person tutorial so the tutor has really piled them up for us as compensation for missing that. They look like they won’t require so much brain power so I should be able to slot them in over the next three weeks alongside looking at the past papers.
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Hi there Arnold.
I’m very impressed with the amount of courses and info in general on your Foreign Perspectives website. There’s a lot of useful info here. I am starting an OU course in October – the new S317 Biological Science. It’s been recommended that I try to do some of the S204 course in order to prepare for this. So I hope you don’t mind but I am going to ask you a favour. I notice you say you did 80 pages of revision notes for this course. I know this was all your hard work, but is there any chance I could see these notes online to give me a good idea of the course content? I would be very grateful. All the best, Anton.
S317 is basically S377 (cell biology) and S366 (evolution) combined. The preparation problem isn’t so much with the evolution bit (although you’d be as well to have done either S204 or S295 in advance) but in the cell biology.
For that, the best preparation is to go over the relevant sections of S204 which are available on the S377 site: http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/modules/s377#am-i-ready . Those who did S204 didn’t do those chapters at the time so they aren’t covered in my notes. As a guide to how long it should take, we did roughly a chapter per week and there are nine chapters on the S377 site.