Foreign Perspectives

All being well, you’ll  be just about to start on a brilliant Christmas Day by the time this is published. We try to keep it a no-computer day so as computers need holidays too 🙂 Well, we sure need a break from them anyway.

Take more care with your food intake than I did a few weeks back. A really nice looking German hotdog in the Belfast Christmas market turned out to be something of a breeding ground for salmonella which led me low for a surprising amount of time.If it ain’t 100% cooked, leave it on the plate!

Watch all those nice new Christmas prezzies too. Some drongos trashed the house of one of the nicest old ladies you could meet the day before Christmas Eve. For what though? She certainly doesn’t have a house stuffed full of the latest electronics that they could get shot of easily. Nope, just mindless vandalism.

Pay particular attention to the roads this year too. We’ve finally managed to get a white Christmas alright but boy does that make for some seriously low temperatures and dreadful driving conditions. Worth noting is that the salt that they currently use on UK roads doesn’t work too well below -10C in terms of melting the ice/snow although obviously the grit mixed in with it does help things. Since large chunks of the country have been quite consistently below that, you might not want to be relying too heavily on the assumption that gritted roads = safe roads. Forget all about drinking and driving in conditions like this too.

Finally, why not do something nice for someone in the Christmas spirit? Just yesterday, a nice lady in Marks & Spencers handed us her £5 off voucher when she saw that we’d be able to use it whilst she couldn’t. It’s always nice to return that favour to someone else a la Good Samaritans who I’ve run into a surprising number of times over the years. But what about trying to repay the kindness twice? I’m sure that it wouldn’t take a massively long time before we were all knee deep in acts of kindness if everyone did that. Wouldn’t that be a nice thing to happen?

In the end I managed to get 1930 words for the second part though it doesn’t seem to be an overly lax word count for that part. That leaves a bit of a break before the client side (TT281) course starts at the end of January.

I’m expecting to do rather more work for TT281 as I’ve much less of a background in client side stuff and, of course, there’s the small matter of the overlap with both the tail end of A251 and the start of S204.

The most annoying part of TT280 (and the rest of the TT courses) is that the course material is drip-fed week by week so you couldn’t get any more than a few weeks ahead. Whilst I generally don’t run massively ahead of the course schedule, it was annoying to have to go to the website to download the course guide for each week: normally I get that done in the first week of the course. The forums were a bit hyperactive at the start and it was several weeks into the course before they calmed down enough to keep any kind of handle on what was being talked about. It would be very easy to sink below the tide of messages and some people appeared to do just that.

I was tootling along quite nicely up to last week.

The web design assignment was coming together nicely with a web site that looked reasonable and only a few hundred words shy of the target for the accompanying report. Another hour or two would complete the medicine course assignment. The reading for the archaeology course was really far ahead of schedule and it was looking like I’d be making a start on the assignment this week. Not only that but I clocked up passes in three courses on the Thursday, particularly welcome in the case of the astronomy course, the exam for which seemed to be a totally dire experience for the majority of people.

Even real life was motoring along quite nicely with all our original set of Christmas cards away getting on for two weeks before Christmas. OK, that might not seem a massive success to you, but believe me, it’s a major achievement for us. We’d managed to see the Christmas play twice and were rolling on downhill towards the kids party, Santa photos, and planned Christmas shopping. Yes, I know, we really should do the Christmas shopping earlier but at least this year we had assembled our shopping list quite early (for us, anyway).

And then I grabbed one of the German hotdogs at the Christmas market which has laid me low with food poisoning for most of the week. And there was the snow and ice which both limited our range and massive increased the time taken to get anywhere. And then there was the flu that one after the other of us managed to pick up.

That lost week has messed up the plan to do “collect at store” for a number of items which is probably no bad thing as one item is available in a thoroughly snowed in area. Supposedly the home delivery is in “two days” which sounds remarkably optimistic but there you go. I think we may need to put off Christmas for a couple of days.

Oh, and there’s the issue that the spot we’ve booked for our Christmas lunch appears to remarkably difficult to get to at the moment.

Although it’s not possible to make direct comparisons between the figures from 2009, it is possible to make a few observations about the spread of those marks.

The breakdown in the Autumn 2009 Sesame gives the breakdown of grades 1 to 4 (the four pass grades) as 22.9%, 23.6%, 22.2% and 15.6% (thus 15.7% failed it, or, for the more optimistic, 84.3% passed it).

Because we only have the marks in part 1 (the multiple choice bit) and part 2 (the two short answer sections), it’s not possible to just add the figures we have together. However, since the grade ones in part 2 totalled 4% and grades 1 and 2 in part 2 totalled 20%, it seems sure that the overall spread of marks this year is substantially below that of 2009.

That an exam is particularly difficult or particularly easy in any given year shouldn’t matter as marks are generally “adjusted” on the basis that, on average, a given cohort of students should be similar to any other cohort and therefore should get similar marks hence the marks are generally adjusted. That doesn’t seem to have happened this year though.

Or maybe they have and something threw a spanner in the works? Like the very oddly distributed marks of question 16 perhaps?

It seemed at the time to be a difficult course to revise for and it proved to be quite difficult to do on the day too.

The multiple choice part was by far the easiest to do in practice with 60% of people picking up 70% (ie grade 1 or 2) on it and only 6% failing it.

The short answer questions show a dramatic drop in overall performance though. Although the individual question results don’t look too bad (50% in grade 1 or 2 in the two easiest questions, 25% on the two hardest in part 1), the overall mark for this section of the paper shows only 20% getting grade 1 or 2 and 25% failing it which means that a number of people didn’t answer the required number of questions.

By far the worst section was cosmology with question 15 on dark matter being a disaster for most people. Only 49% passed it and just 7% picked up a grade 1 or 2. Surprisingly, question 13 on Hubble classifications wasn’t much better with 52% passing it and 12% getting grade 1 or 2; I’m not sure why this happened as the question doesn’t look amazingly difficult but clearly an awful lot of people dropped marks all over the place on it.

Some individual questions proved to be surprisingly difficult and have a deceptively easy look to them. Question 10 on star properties felled 35% of those doing it and Question 12 on the end of life of stars proved to be difficult to do really well with although most people passed it. The Hubble classification question was a shock to me as it looks like it should be easy to do well with it yet few did and almost half failed it. Probably the oddest result is that of the final question on the universe though, with almost identical numbers of people in every percentile which implies that people generally did that last and just answered whatever they could. Quite a peculiar spread to the marks even so.

Answering the right number of questions is something that many people fell down on. Despite not overly great marks in individual questions the overall marks for the short answer section were lower than most individual questions which implies that people skipped questions altogether. You just can’t afford to do that on a difficult paper and it resulted in 25% of people failing that section. Thanks to the multiple choice section this equates to around 10% failing overall.

Rather a difficult subject to do well with and one that I’m glad I don’t have to repeat. Commiserations to the 40 or so people who will be resitting it.