Is a very high IQ useful when studying with the Open University?
February 1st, 2010 | 
Author: “Ok, I’m high IQ and easily bored” is how a recent comment on one of the Open University forums begain and it pretty much immediately sparked off something of a war which is still running. I’ll grant that the original poster was rather insensitive to say the least in her post but it is an interesting topic.
To begin with the OU is an open access outfit which means that for almost all courses you don’t need to provide any kind of proof that you can do them before you sign up. The net effect of this is that the dropout rate in first year courses in any subject is generally 40 to 50%. This isn’t solely because people are signing up for courses that they just don’t have the brainpower to do though. As with all part-time courses the dropout rate is a little higher because people have real lives that interfere with their studies. And, of course, there’s quite a lot of people who sign up for courses and don’t fully appreciate what’s involved before they begin.
But, does a high IQ actually help you when you’re studying? Well, yes, obviously it does. The question though is just how much it helps and that’s a more difficult question. One that I suspect is impossible to answer before you’ve tried out one of the OU courses.
From my own experience, it would appear that you can try out just about any course to get a general feel for how well you will do with them taking into account your IQ and indeed all your personal experiences. For example, although the OU recommend around 16 hours per week for a 60 point course and 8 for a 30 point course, I find that in most cases I need less than half that time. The one exception was a 60 point English course which I managed with about 3 hours a week vs the 16 recommended.
Obviously the IQ will be a significant factor in helping you to understand material that is radically different from anything you’ve done before. However, don’t underestimate the effect of previous experience. The reason that English course took 3 hours a week rather than the six or seven that I’d expected was that I’d done similar work in French & Spanish to that in parts of the English course. Similarly, I am going through my current astronomy course at a frightening rate because I’ve met a number of the concepts before.
So, yes, a high IQ will certainly help with the OU as it does everywhere else. However, don’t underestimate the benefit that you’ll get from prior experience of the subject as that seems, for me, to be at least as significant.
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Having previously studied at a bricks and mortar university, I feel that the standards maintained by OU are at least as high. The first years courses start a little lower than some universities but end up been just as challenging. Depending on your IQ and experience will determine how much time you devote to a subject.
OU are to be commended for giving people an opportunity to better themselves whist retaining the rigour of the subjects they cover.
I’d go as far as saying that the standards are generally higher than the majority of brick unis. Sure, Oxford or Cambridge are going to beat it on most things but then the vast majority of students don’t go to Oxford or Cambridge. What’s probably more important in the long run is that the OU gradually improve courses over time through their use of course teams to prepare them. In a normal university, you generally only get one lecturer working on the development of a course.
It’s that “prior experience” that really muddies the waters in comparisons. Whereas in normal universities, students are going straight into a subject after studying it in school for some years, in the OU a lot of people are either coming to a subject after a break in studying (often of some years or even decades) or coming to a completely new subject for them.
What surprised me most is how consistent that adjustment factor in time taken to do a course vs their suggested time to do a course was. I’ve not done any formal study of it but I gather that most people find the same consistency in courses they do.