Foreign Perspectives

Thanks to the excellent pre-exam briefings by the course team, this was one exam that didn’t seem to cause people anything like the level of anxiety that others have been known to do.

As noted in the earlier post, the chemistry exam follows a very similar pattern from one year to the next. Almost to the point of being identical in many respects. Thus, question 1 is always a box diagram question and, as the course team commented, just about everyone gets full marks for it. In fact, the majority of the short questions are very similar from one year to the next and, because they follow the order of the books, you can pretty much bank on, say, question 7 being on whatever question 7 was on last year. That’s not to say that they’re all doable as it’s a massive course and few people revise everything but it does mean that selective revision is quite effective.

That follows through largely for the longer questions too although as the years have gone on, there seems to be more of a tendency to have one question covering parts of one or two other related areas ie if you’re doing selective revision then you’ll not be on totally firm ground all of the time. Moreover, the second and third longer sections are less easy use focused revision with than in the first section (which I think is always a choice between kinetics, orbitals and retrosynthetic analysis). Or perhaps it’s just that I’m less keen on the section C  and Dquestions?

What I did find pleasantly surprising was that even on my pessimistic in-exam estimate, I was well clear of 40%. That’s not so much because the exam was easy but that the whole exam is broken up into what’s effectively a very long list of short questions, albeit with several grouped into topics (ie the long questions).

That’s the problem with the euro situation at the moment: it really is placing a bet on it surviving.

Spain is being given another 100 billion to bet on it’s banking system surviving the crisis. Greece, unless they elect a far left or right government, will probably be given a similar amount to bet on it’s banking system and not too long from now Italy and Portugal will follow with equally large bets.

All this is just fine if the bets win. If they don’t that money will need replaced and the amount remaining in the kitty will be rather low at that point. Moreover, if the bets don’t win there’ll be a whole bunch of real-world things needing financing at the same time that the bets are written off which is a nightmare scenario for everyone in Europe and none too good for anyone anywhere else for that matter.

Either way, it would appear that we’re in for an interesting second half of 2012.

Just one more full day of revision to go and the exam will be upon me.

The chemistry course has been something of an interesting journey for me. It began just a week or so after the S204 (biology) exam so the first few weeks went in a bit of a blur as I recovered from that. The next few months ran alongside a full-time computer course which ate up a lot of the time that ordinarily would have been available for study and then it was on to the new job which ate up even more time. Not a good recipe for great performance on the course and the marks tracked the availability of time for the course pretty well ie not great after the first assignment. Funnily enough, now that I’ve had a fairly good run at the revision, I feel reasonably confident about the exam (the confidence could dissipate quite quickly on Tuesday morning though!).

I began the revision a few weeks ago based on the “bookmarks” and chapter summaries that the course team very helpfully pulled out. Together those run to 152 pages which is fairly comparable with the amount on S204 if you take into account the different font size. The information density is so high that it takes ages to read through and I wish I’d started a few weeks earlier as my target of a book’s worth per day made for a very hard slog at times.

Stage two was based around the past papers and two tutorials relating to those. Whilst in S204 there were chunks of the books classed as optional, in S205 the options are enshrined on the paper itself. As usual, the short questions are from the entire course but since it’s 8 from 12 you can effectively omit one or possibly two books and still do quite well. I find that in practice I’m able to pick 6 to 8 questions that I can do very well from each of the past papers which equates to around 25% to 30% of the overall marks for the paper ie in principle I should almost have passed just on the short questions.

The longer questions are divided up into three sections and you pick 1 from 3 in each of those sections. The first section seems the easiest with substitution/elimination and retrosynthetic analysis that seem fairly doable in each of the papers. The second section has kinetics and spectroscopy which generally seem quite doable alongside orbitals and bonding which don’t so a reasonable selection again. The final section seems the most difficult potentially with a VSEPR question that can be all over the place, a Born-Haber cycle that’s mostly doable and what could very much be a nightmare book 9 question. Still, hopefully with 25% in the bank from the short questions I won’t need a massive amount from the longer ones to achieve a pass.

I’m planning on going over my one page of notes tomorrow and perhaps to look in more detail at the crystals book and, of course, there’s the exam bag to be packed.

This year the bag will be a lot more packed than usual. There’s the normal pens, pencil, spare pen and pencil, ruler, calculator, spare calculator (yes, I know, paranoid), wine gums (I’m expecting a number of “wine gum moments” for this exam), Lucozade and passport (you need photo ID for the exam). To that are added the molecular model kit (although I’ve yet to see a question that required it) and the data book. Since I have them from the S204 exam, I’ll likely take along the coloured pencils and drawing kit: I’m sure that some day I’ll do an exam where I’ll use them.

As with the S204 exam, there’s no rest period afterwards as I’ve to get the CMAs for both the residentials done before the end of the month and get back into the SD329 reading as there’s an assignment for it due just after I get back from the residentials.

An awful lot of people are now taking it for granted that Greece will be parting ways with the euro later this year. The only question now seems to be whether it’ll be an orderly exit or a total fiasco. Either way, it seems sure to be something of a roller coaster ride for everyone.

But, whether or not Greece exits the euro, there remains the question as to what to do in the rest of Europe. There are just too many major economies in trouble and needing to grow their economies at the same time as cutting their deficits. One country trying to do one of those choices is difficult but several countries trying to do both simultaneously seems an incredibly unlikely prospect. The result seems likely to be a little of one, a little of the other and overall nothing much happening that’s in any way positive.

In the midst of this the European central bank president sees the future as him taking over the position of the central banker for all the Eurozone countries. That would have been the sensible way to go 10 years back when the euro began. Now it brings forth the vision of Bankia writ very, very large: not the merger of seven lame-duck regional banks this time to create one bigger failing bank but rather the merger of a number of lame-duck central banks to create one bigger failing central bank. Even if he had the time and there were the political inclination to do it, it seems just a means of postponing the inevitable break-up of the Eurozone and, just as the collapse of Bankia will be more painful than the collapse of the individual banks that created it would have been, the collapse of the super central bank would be much, much more painful than the collapse of one or two smaller ones would (will?) be.

Painful as it may well be, it would seem that the best way forward would be to recreate the drachma, lire, peseta and perhaps the punt.

Pension payments for all but the lowest paid in the public sector are going up (mostly doubling) and they’re going to have to work longer before they are entitled to the maximum pension. Surely it must only be right that the well paid public servants in secure jobs pay more for their gold plated pensions? Why should the rest of us pay for their pensions anyway?

The snag with public sector pensions is that the employer is the government so therefore, yes, the rest of us do have to pay for their pensions. Unless you’d rather that they get no pensions at all (in which case, I hope you don’t mind doing without schools, hospitals, etc.) then the government (ie taxpayers) must act as responsible employers and pay for those pensions. The other snag is that, unlike private sector pensions, the public sectors operate on a pay as you go system which means that the current workers pay for the pensions of the current pensioners or rather taxes do (that’s how the normal retirement pension operates too).

OK, so we should pay them a pension, but surely we shouldn’t be paying the well-paid public servants gold plated pensions? Actually, well-paid public servants are very much in the minority with a considerable number getting close to the minimum wage. Courtesy of a number of changes in recent years, that “gold-plating” is looking distinctly tarnished with three separate schemes being introduced over the last 10 years, the prior schemes being closed to new members and each new scheme being markedly poorer than the one before. The latest offering is a lurch towards an average salary rather than the current final salary scheme which will be a major, major drop in the pensions that people will be eligible for though, as usual with pensions, a magnitude of a drop that most people wouldn’t realise until it was far too late.

In some ways it could be a good thing. The net effect, for public servants who realise it, is that their lifetime earnings is being cut quite dramatically so it might encourage more to leave for the private sector. The only snag with that is that we need those public services that the people most likely to leave provide. On the whole, those most likely to leave would be the higher earners. Do you really want to have an exodus of teachers, nurses, etc.? What about the well-paid Whitehall people perhaps? Surely they can be done without? Certainly, if you’re happy to have poor advice given to the government on all kinds of matters, you could do without them.

Should you strike? Despite being what I’d say was one of the most right wing union representatives ever, I think, yes, this is a time to show that you support your union negotiators.

Should you support the strike as a taxpayer? I think yes too as it’s really going to impact on the quality of public servants and hence public services that you get over the years to come.