Foreign Perspectives

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.

The final TT280 result sneaked in without me noticing a few days ago.

Our merry band have been reduced by another 20 this time with the original 481 now down to 437. As before, almost everyone is in the 85-100% range with the marks and consequently have over 15% towards their final mark. You need to pass both the CMAs and the ECA so everyone still needs to clear 40% on the ECA rather than the 30% that they may think they need.

The ECA itself is a bit of a peculiar beast, consisting of a four page website, a 1000 word report for the client and a 2000 word technical report. Previous versions of the course appeared to have ran with a single combined report which makes more sense as there’s a lot of duplication between the two reports and going by the course descriptions, later courses in the web applications certificate only have one report.

The website itself is a doddle with the only hassle being that it must validate. Having said that, if you haven’t written any HTML before it would probably be a bit of an eye opener but in reality they only require a very simple website. I’m using the W3C’s Amaya program to run it up which handily validates everything as you write. That immediate validation is something of a pain at times but does avoid the grief of having to go through hundreds of validation errors later on.

The ECA is due next week which seems to have come around terribly quickly and despite me running three weeks ahead for most of the course I’ll only be submitting the ECA a few days early. That’s the problem in general with the TT courses: any slack you may build up is eaten up very quickly indeed.

When the Economist mentions something in several different articles it’s a pretty good bet that the something is in big trouble.

Last week they opened with a potted summary of the emergency support fund being set up by the Euro zone governments in an effort to patch up the radically different speeds which they’re running at. Then there was the leader urging leaders to forget about the option of breaking up the Euro and how dire it would be for a time. Finally, there was the briefing going through how it would be done and how difficult it would be to do.

The problem with the emergency fund being explicitly set up is that everyone knows just how much money is in the kitty. That’s sure to prompt some people to stretch that kitty to the limit whether they be speculators or governments wishing that they could just devalue.

Listing the processes necessary to recreate an old currency is frankly just asking for trouble. As they point out, doing so would cause massive upheaval in the financial markets lasting years and knock-on consequences of the real economy in the country doing it internally and through difficulties in trading with other countries during the change-over period. Unfortunately, those countries are already facing years of upheaval and austerity budgets and moreover their country’s finances will be run by un-elected officials from other countries during that period. Wouldn’t the upheaval in recreating their own currencies be worth it for them? At least they’d be able to have a real say in how their budget was run.

One of the major problems they foresee is the logistics of printing the new currency in secrecy. Unfortunately, there is one Euro zone country that doesn’t need to do that. Ireland’s banks already print sterling notes and one, relatively doable, option would be simply for Ireland to revert to their former linked currency explicitly, at least for a while.

So, will it be Ireland that will pull out first? Whoever it is, they seem unlikely to be the last.