Foreign Perspectives

Dropout rates in the open university are a very tangible thing. You can see that there are fewer people in each tutorial as the year progresses.

Where it’s by far the highest is in the first course of a given subject. That’s not necessarily at level 1 though as some subjects only start at level 2. Thus the drop out rate for something like psychology is quite high at level 2 because there is no psychology course at level 1 (or wasn’t until last year anyway).

The drop out rate from “hard” subjects isn’t necessarily that high. Or, rather, it is but the students drop out of the subject before they get to the point of choosing it thus the people starting “hard” subjects tend to be more committed to them.

I was actually quite lucky during the modern languages sequence of courses as, by chance, the drop out rate in my tutor group was unusually low. In fact it wasn’t completely by chance as what happened was that we formed a study group consisting of almost everyone within the tutor group early on. All but one of those people went on to complete the diploma and several went on to do the modern languages degree. Getting into a study group early on is that important.

However, in courses within my life sciences programme, the drop out has been very, very noticeable. You notice it when half the group isn’t there by the third or fourth month into the course. Even after the first assignment the drop out was quite noticeable and also noticeable was that the tutor seemed to start with the view that many of those at the first tutorial wouldn’t be there at the second one. She was right.

What’s generally worth noting for prospective students is that some courses front load the course texts with difficult material, seemingly in an effort to weed out those students who will drop out as early as possible. Not all do that mind you but if you’re finding the first unit or two of a course very difficult, have a leaf through what’s coming up as often it’s much easier. Being way too stubborn to drop out saw me right through the modern languages degree and frankly that is something that I would never have believe I’d have ten years back.

The TT courses have developed something of a reputation of slipping up with the assessments resulting in numerous questions needing to be “zero-weighted” ie not counting towards the final mark.

It looks like the first CMA of TT281 is continuing in this tradition. In TT280, the preceding course, the marks for the three CMA worked out to have around 80% of students achieving the top grade and 15% getting the next highest grade ie a total of 95% or so getting grades 1 or 2. For the first CMA of TT281 the figures are rather different with only 18% getting that top grade and 61% getting the top two grades and 89% in the top three grades. Overall, it looks like most people have dropped something like 20% to 30% in their marks which is pretty bad.

The reason basically is down to a combination of rather less clear questions and what appears to be quite a high number of iffy “correct” answers. In my own case I count six where the “correct” answer is rather iffy and three where it’s definitely wrong which equates to over 20% of the answers.

Naturally a lot of people are currently fuming about this. The response from the course team is that the explanatory paper will be released sometime next week. Somehow I think that’ll spark even more argument if a whole raft of the questions aren’t zero-rated.

Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB flash drive that I keep for such situations.

Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boot machine so I had a go at starting it up in Windows which threw up “PXE-61E media test failure check cable”. Not overly helpful given that it’s a laptop and doesn’t have a drive cable as such. Even more interesting was that a) Grub loaded and b) it was able to access all the files on the disk (you can try this via Grub’s ls and cat commands eg cat (hd0,6)/boot/grub/menu.lst).

Anyway, I thought I’d have a go at reinserting the drive. No luck, but since Grub could see the drive contents I thought I’d have a go at copying off the files. Nothing doing re booting the machine via the live USB flash with the drive in. However, it booted up fine with the drive taken out which in turn opened up the option of installing Ubuntu on a USB drive. That worked just fine.

Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB drive that I keep for such situations.

Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boot machine so I had a go at starting it up in Windows which threw up “PXE-61E media test failure check cable”. Not overly helpful given that it’s a laptop and doesn’t have a drive cable as such.

Next step was booting the system up from the USB drive that I’d just created but with the old disk attached. That worked fine too and I figured it was off to buy a new drive. Last thing software-wise worth trying was to run the Ubuntu disk-utility on the old drive which sorted out whatever was the problem with it and it’s working fine now.

So minus a day or two of messing around but plus a fully bootable Ubuntu drive and fresh backup.

I went for a job interview yesterday which was unusual in that, whilst I felt that I did meet the requirements for the job on the whole, I didn’t fulfil all their essential requirements. So, I shouldn’t have been asked for the interview.

The snag is that, as with many other employers at the moment, these guys basically wrote a wish list rather than a list of requirements that anybody they could expect to recruit would actually possess. Not quite in the same league as one notorious job advert a few years back which had as an essential requirement a minimum of 5 years experience in using a particular version of software that had only been released the year before, but certainly getting there. That wish-list approach is one reason why it’s best to apply for a job that you like the sound of but which you feel you can only do a small fraction of: employers have been known to get a zero response from some job adverts these days as a consequence of that wish-list mentality.

For example, they asked for experience of a product that was written by a company who have since gone bankrupt and which seems to be mainly used in a different continent. I’m guessing that the number of people who could cover that will be quite limited and indeed the acknowledged local expert is returning to Canada later this year.

Other things had an air of inconsistency about them. Things like an essential requirement of experience in a product that is long past its heyday whilst also having a complete knowledge of the latest of technologies.

One question was particularly interesting in that they reckoned that the team would largely be made up of people in their 20s who would be “very sharp and know all the latest software” so how would I deal with that. Actually, chances are that I’d be even more up to date than they are since, as y’all know, I’m in the midst of a university IT course. It’s been a long time since I met anyone who could talk me under the table in terms of computer technology and even then it was a telecoms guy and they don’t count.

Oh well, I guess I better keep at the job applications.

For the most part, the relative valuation of currencies isn’t something that affects day to day life for most people.

After all, outside holidays, how often do you directly buy something from overseas? Even with Internet sales sites as numerous as they are, in reality most people buy from their closest outlet for the simple reason that to do otherwise would add to the shipping costs. Even when that’s not so much the case it needs a major price disparity to make it worthwhile shipping internationally for most products.

However, that all changes when it’s a major transaction such as a house. Which is why we find ourselves wonder just what’s going to happen to the sterling/euro rate over the next six months or so.

Frankly, most ways of predicting the future direction of exchange rates are little more than gambling. However, looking at it historically the rate has been between 1.50€ to about 1.05€ over the last five years and around 1.10€ to 1.25€ over the last year. Perhaps more importantly though is that the Euro is clearly overvalued a lot. For example, the Big Mac Index puts the over-valuation at 30% (ie the 1.50€ from getting on for five year ago is the right one); the problem is that it can take a long time before a currency reaches its correct exchange rate, however one might define that.

So what’s a person to do?

In practice most people do nothing which leaves them wide-open to what can be massive exchange rate differences. For example, that 15% change over the last year might not sound like much but translate that into a house price of, say, 200,000€ and you could be looking at a change of around 30,000€ which isn’t small change obviously.

Second choice is to translate the prices into your own currency at the current rate and build that into the sale contract. A reasonable option for you, if you can convince the other party into running with it. Chances are that in reality this is going to be a non-runner.

Finally, there’s the option of using one of the currency exchange places and fixing the exchange rate in advance. There are a whole lot of options with this route but the principle differences are between committing yourself to buy/sell at the rate quoted and getting an option to buy/sell at that rate. It’s much, much better to run with the option as, of course, the exchange rate could move in your favour. With an option, you can change your mind and exchange at the better rate.