Foreign Perspectives

Prosperity for all is the aim but it’s going to be a long time before we get to that point as this budget is all about repairing the foundations of the economy that were so badly damaged by the previous Labour administration.

There’s a sensible capping of benefits almost across the board with probably the largest headlines to come from the cap on housing benefit. One suspects that the largest headlines to come will be from some of those in the million pound housing benefit mansions.

What it also cut was a whole raft of seemingly minor benefits which were introduced piecemeal over the course of the previous Labour administration. What all those different benefits largely did was to create a whole bureaucracy to administer them with little benefit for those who probably needed them most who never even knew they existed.

Increasing VAT to 20% after next Christmas is the single measure that paid for much of the changes. Notably this is a simple measure rather than the complex mix of additional tarifs that some recommended in terms of eliminating exemptions to childrens’ clothing or books.

With the announced substantial cuts in government spending there’s going to be something of a forced move from the public to the private sector for many. That’s going to need equally substantial retraining in many instances.

What this is intended to do overall is to get rid of what has become a crippling level of public debt in a remarkably short period of time. That rapid reduction meant a fairly harsh budget but one that should get us back on an even keel within the forseeable future.

With massive cuts all around us it’s interesting that the BBC has picked up on a study by the Sutton Trust to the effect that were current student charges (ie for non-OU people) raised from the current £3k to £7k there’d be potentially an 80% drop in students studying.

That would be fine were those universities the only kids on the block but the existence of the OU raises an interesting option. Right now, you can study full-time at the OU for around £1200 to £2000 for most courses and even for law it’s only £4000-odd. Thus even now it’s cheaper than normal universities (for comparable or better quality education too).

Now, although the OU is the biggest university in the UK with around 200,000 students, there are more like 2 million students in the UK at the moment. Somehow, I just can’t see the OU being able to cope with what could potentially be close to ten times the number of students. Oh, over a period of years I’m sure it could manage but not in one fell swoop.

For other universities, “too many” students wouldn’t be a problem as they could simply turn down students once “enough” had been reached. However, the OU lets students sign up for courses online up to a month or two before courses start with, apparently, no student limits being applied. Existing students can even sign up right up to the course start date.

I suspect that it might be prudent to sign up for courses a little earlier than normal this year as any increase in student fees seems likely to result in a swing towards the OU which is going to have to put out the “no vacancies” sign at some point.

For a change, I had quite a decent revision plan worked out for this exam. That’s largely thanks to the advice sent out by the course team a month or two before the exam which enabled quite well targeted revision. That in turn made for a more comfortable exam than it would have been otherwise.

Of course, that’s not to say that the revision was perfect as several of the short questions showed up limitations in this revision strategy in that I’d not covered their topics in sufficient detail to answer them nearly as well as I’d have liked to. Still, overall I think I did quite well on the exam and amazingly well considering that a year ago I’d not done any biology at all.

The problem with an exam is that there’s quite a long period working up to it both in terms of the course time and the more intense revision period just prior to the exam. That leaves me at least all hyped up and it was two full days after the exam before I’d gotten back to normal and back into working on the courses that are still running on for me.

Which has me wondering how long it’ll take me to wind down from the S204 + S320 combo exam in October next year. Still, at least after their exams I’ll have several months of a break.

Thus far in the fifth series the planting of forward links has been much more heavy-handed than we’d become used to though the era of the Harold Saxon arc which managed to place untold numbers of forward links that were easy to miss at the time but obvious in hindsight. This series has largely been a series of one-off episodes with little overall linkage other than the heavy handed crack to link them together.

Tonight’s episode had so many separate threads in it that it felt more like a 90 minute episode than the normal length one that it actually was. That’s quite a good thing and one or two of the previous episodes in this series have been quite similar. The linkages might have been too heavy-handed for my liking but it was great to have that “quart into a pint pot” feeling more than once during the series.

Tonight we finally saw a number of threads coming together or rather the Amy Pond and River Song threads starting to come together (although he hasn’t met her for the first time yet). We’ve even a fairly complete pantheon of bad guys in an alliance to save the universe which does seem to be asking for trouble in a seriously big way.

Oh well, only 7 days to find out…

As it turned out, the last minute revision wasn’t really required with the exception of a brief look at the diagram of the digestion system.

Unexpectedly, the digestion question was pretty much  a repeat of the July 2006 question “Write an essay that describes the process of digestion involved in consuming a cheese and tomato sandwich.” replacing “cheese” with “egg” and adding “absorption”. The endocrine, circulation and stress essays were unexpectedly general and looked easy enough to do.

The data handling was loosely based on a stress experiment although you didn’t need to know anything about stress to do it. Unexpectedly again there was a graph to be drawn which represented 1/3rd of the marks for that question. I think it’s fairly safe to say that most people will get over 20 out of the possible 30 marks for it so in theory even 10 out of 30 for the essay plus a couple of short answer questions would be enough for a pass.

The short questions were all over the place as expected. First off was a hard core chemistry question was seemed not to have been a good start for most people. Nobody seemed to have gotten the circle of Willis one in my group and there was another one which I suspect my mark will be close to zero. Other than those two the rest were quite a reasonable mix and largely answerable from my “27 page” summary although not entirely as it turned out (no mention of the circle of Willis for instance, no mention of the chemistry angle either). There was at least one repeat from previous years (advice to a pregnant friend re smoking to have a smaller size baby and easier birth) and one or two others looked kind of familiar so it’s definitely worthwhile looking at past papers for this one.

Strategy-wise I took a brief look at the essay questions first before taking a run through all of the short questions and scribbling out a few keywords that struck me. That worked out really well as I managed to answer a few more of the short questions than I had originally expected to be able to answer as a couple of things came to me whilst I was doing the essay and data handling question. It also gave me a lot of time to do the short question as the essay only took 45 minutes or so and the data handling was about the same.

Quite oddly I felt very comfortable with this exam which is certainly a major change from being all stressed out (as was everyone) with last years Child Development course. Marks-wise I have a pessimistic estimate of 60 but didn’t have enough time to do my optimistic estimate this time (the last few of the short questions took lots of thinking time).