Foreign Perspectives

The Open University have an interesting type of degree called the “open” degree which is essentially a degree where you can plonk just about any combination of courses into subject only to it meeting the broad requirements of a degree. So, for example, you need to have 120 points at level 3 for an honours degree but those points could be made up of courses in, say, physics, history, English and art.

Since I’m basically aiming at a named degree I’d ignored anything to do with the open degrees. However, the other night it struck me that there’s a semi-open degree option available too in that my life sciences degree only requires me to have 300 points of life sciences subjects and the remaining 60 points can be any subject.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t really matter to me but as I have to collect the life sciences degree no later than 2014 any help along the way to that is welcome. So I had a think about that. In fact by this time next year I should already have those 60 miscellaneous points accumulated in the form of my current astronomy course and part of the certificate in web applications. Of those two, the astronomy course forms part of what will, some day, become a physics cum chemistry degree but the web applications certificate (a total of 60 points) doesn’t have a proper home at the moment. So, if I find that doubling up on the courses is becoming a bit much I could transfer the web applications courses into the life sciences degree.

That option has a lot of appeal in that my original plan was to do the main chemistry course next year and use those 60 points but longer term that causes a problem in that I would ultimately need to acquire 60 more chemistry points for the chemistry degree. It also has the plus point that it doesn’t leave the web applications certificate just hanging there unattached to any particular degree.

All Open University courses with exams offer a certain amount of guidance as to what and how to revise for the final exam.

So, for instance, ED209 and SK277 gave a list of chapters from which the essay questions would be drawn. Unfortunately, S282 doesn’t have any essay questions so the assumption is that you will know the entire course. In practical terms that means that the amount of revision required for this 30 point course is much more than you’d normally need to do for a 60 point course.

The lack of essay questions means that there’s no difference in the approach to revision between the multiple choice questions and the short answer ones. The only practical difference arises on the day itself (the 18th is awfully close, isn’t it?) when you’ve to answer all of the multiple choice questions but only six from eight of the short answer ones. For example, “The solar spectrum can be approximated by a black-body spectrum with a temperature of 5770 K. At what wavelength, in nm, does the peak emission occur in this black-body spectrum?” could (and has) appeared as both a multiple choice question and as part of a short answer question.

So, given that there’s getting on for a thousand pages in the course books, what’s the best approach to revising for the exam?

First off, don’t forget two very important pages in the exam headed “Useful data, equations and expressions” which contain all the constants and equations that you’ll need to answer the questions and some more that you don’t need. Thus you don’t need to memorise the equations dotted throughout the course although you will need to remember what the symbols mean and, of course, what equation to use in which circumstances.

Second, the best place to begin revising seems to be to pull out all the excellent chapter summaries along with the learning outcomes (only available through the course website). If you’re doing the course in 2010 you’ll find my copy of this on the TMA4 conference under question 4; I can’t make it available here as it’s OU copyright. One important thing to note about this is that the chapter summaries don’t address all the learning outcomes although there aren’t many that they miss. Also, they don’t include diagrams thus they don’t have the frequency spectrum (required for a couple of questions in past papers) and they don’t include the HR-diagram which is regularly required in exams. You can easily add those to the summaries though.

Finally, there are the past papers. Only five years worth of these are available at any one time thus in 2010 you can get 2005-2009. Whilst somebody has quite usefully done a full analysis of where the questions came from, in reality the answer was “just about everywhere”.

A very useful approach seems to be to go through the chapter summaries, then work through the past papers to gain speed and confidence with the questions (you can get the answers from the past papers forum) and finally go back to the summaries and add whatever additional information was required to answer the questions. It’s time consuming but there seems to be no way to avoid that for this exam.

It’s also worth noting that it is possible to pass this and around 85% of those sitting the exam in 2009 passed. The questions might initially look impossible to do but with a bit of work they are doable and fairly quickly too for the most part.

It’s been a long time since we’ve mentioned anything of consequence about France.

The main reason is that there’s nothing much of note happening. Having said that, over the past few months we’ve had a growing level of interest in Mas Camps with three or four more interested parties having a look at the place. The latest one is offering a mixture of cash and a house which seems interesting if a little complicated financially and legally.

Alongside that we’ve had the usual run of bills from assorted arms of the French government who don’t seem to be able to fully grasp the concept that we’re no longer living in France. One particularly interesting one is for a tax that’s only payable if you’re living in France for which they’ve managed to change the address to an “interesting” (read: barely legible) version of our home address here ie they know that we’re not living there yet still sent a bill for a tax that would only be payable if we were!

It appears too that the rumoured bypass of the village is going ahead with the new road to be finishing up not too far from our front door.

Yesterday morning saw the presentation on what courses the local tech (OK, Belfast Metropolitan College) can offer in the school for the parents or at least those participating in the community group anyway.

It turns out that English was the most popular option with 18, followed by computing with about 15 and with maths trailing at 11. Those numbers appear to reflect the perceived difficulty of the three courses although I suspect that particular perception could turn out to be somewhat flawed if comments by the prospective tutor for the English and computing courses after the numbers were collected are anything to go by. What it also reflects is the almost exclusively female nature of the group which is why English had no trouble getting the numbers whilst maths had problems even getting to 11.

Anyway, Wendy’s signed up for maths and English which’ll keep her busy in the mornings ’til sometime in June.

The prices for the Kip McGrath tutoring are incredibly confusing and quite off-putting but it turns out that they’re substantially less than I had expected.

Basically what it says is that it’s £25 per student per subject which would mean £100 a week for our two little guys or around £400 a month. In fact, it’s £25 per student per day but as we’re only running with one day and are getting a 20% discount it’s working out at £40 a week for both little guys which is actually around £1.50 a week cheaper than Kumon. Thus, although the original plan was to run with Kip for James who definitely needs it and Kumon for John who’s just sailing through it all, we ended up signing them both up for it and they start this Friday.

Although the website implies that the classes are always five in fact our little guys will be in a class by themselves to begin with at what’s currently the perfect time too. By going right after school on Friday afternoon, they’ll be finishing relatively early which, hopefully, will mean that John won’t be as exhausted as he was sometimes after the Kumon classes.

According to the tutor, James should be where he should be school-wise in around a year or so although I suspect he’ll get there sooner with the Kip McGrath plus all the extra help he’s getting in school. I’m rather dubious about her assessment for John and I’d say that he’ll be way ahead of the rest of his class before the school year is finished.

We’re already getting withdrawal symptoms from the Kumon though. It’s peculiar not to be doing the worksheets every night.