Foreign Perspectives

As with all final tutorials the one yesterday was mainly centred around the exam.

For this course that exam consists of three very different types of questions which require three equally different approaches to revising for them and similarly different tactics in answering them. As always, good time management is important in both revision and on the day of the exam and it’s even more important when the exam paper is made up of totally different types of question.

Coming first on the day are eight short questions whilst last is a choice of one essay from four. Yesterday the consensus was that it was best to answer the essay first as that’s a relatively known quantity so should make for some settling time. The problem with that is that you need to be fairly strict in doing the essay within an hour or so as much of an over-run will cause problems for the rest of the exam. That potential for over-running the time is a big problem for some people: it’s very important to remember that the essay only counts for 30% of the marks so spending, say, 50% of the time on it is unlikely to be productive.

The analysis question is something of an unknown quantity. My thinking on it is that it should be done second basically because it’s the kind of question that you wouldn’t want to feel rushed over. There are likely to be a lot of easy marks to be had from it, notably on the graph if they ask for one as it can take up to 1/3rd of the total marks for the question. Don’t run over the hour on this either though!

Finally, the thinking seemed to be that the short questions should be done last. That’s basically because it would be very easy to over-run the time on this and it could be rather de-motivating if you found that you could only do 6 or 7 of the questions.

Revision should really be done in that order too I think although it’s not really possible to revise for the analysis question.

Saturdays seem to be getting busier and busier for us as it seems like every activity you want to do ends up being scheduled for some time on a Saturday. Thus, we found ourselves on the go pretty much non-stop from about 9.30 through to almost 6pm today.

For the usual reasons (ie religion), Sunday never gets even half so busy as even the least busy Saturday. Whilst may deride the “day of rest” aspect as being totally out of touch with modern society, we’re finding increasingly that we need that day of rest. Granted, we don’t drop all activities on Sundays but we generally end up with something like a half-day at minimum unallocated time.

Today on the other hand was truly manic! Since it was the day for my biology class it meant an early start for the kids with their Kumon which did have the upside that they’d a longer gap between that and the football. However, after football it was off to an audition so we ended up on the go ’til after 6pm: longer than a normal work-day!

Tomorrow is Wendy’s birthday so our normal schedule (OK, ragbag collection of things that we end up doing) will be thrown up in the air although I suspect that most of the birthday activities will take place in the morning and evening.

The SK277 exam is a bit of a ragbag collection of question types which means that thinking about how to approach the exam on the day is likely to make the time on the day that little bit more effective.

The key thing that makes this possible is that you can answer the questions in any order so long as you clearly indicate what question you’re answering as you go along. In fact, you could even write the essay paragraphs in a random order so long as you included an index as to what order to read the paragraphs (I wouldn’t recommend this though as it seems sure to put the marker in a bad mood!).

As those doing this exam will know by now there are four fairly distinct essay questions and we know what chapters of the books that these are based on. Therefore, you’ll be best prepared to answer the essay question. Some people are talking about preparing an essay ahead of time although personally I generally don’t go that far and in this case, unless you’re doing the digestion essay, there seems to be too many potential questions that could be asked. If you are doing the digestion essay it might be worth at least doing a very complete essay plan though obviously you’d need to be able to tailor that on the day depending on whether it was a hamburger, or veggie burger or whatever passing through. You have about an hour to answer this for 30% of the total marks. It’s probably best to start with the essay as there’s a lot of writing to be done for it, you’ll be more relaxed about it because you know the topic area and you’ll be at your best initially. Note that as with the TMA essays there are easy marks to be had in terms of an essay plan (10%?), a decent structure (15%) and diagrams (10%?). Do not stroke out the essay plan!  If you’re doing SXR270, the background reading on circulation is helpful for the circulation essay.

Second up should probably be the data handling question. You’ve an hour or so for this but the implication from the course team is that it’s likely to take much less so you might complete it in 40 minutes or so. The downside is that this is pretty much an unknown quantity although you will have done similar things in the four TMAs so it should be doable. It’s 30% of the total. If they ask for a graph that’s some very easy marks (up to around 30% of the total).

Finally, there’s the short-answer section. You’ve eight questions worth 5% each but chances are you’ll not be able to do all parts of all of them. That in itself is a very good reason to leave them ’til last as it could be somewhat demotivating to find that you had to skip a couple of questions altogether. Don’t worry if that happens though as skipping a question means dropping 5% so it’s not a disaster. Possibly more significant is the time allocation: you have at most 7 minutes per question before you start eating into the time for the other questions; doing them last avoids that issue altogether. Revising for these seems quite hard to me and to make it a little more doable I’ve extracted all the section summaries into one bumper summary of 27 pages. Sounds short? It may be short but it’s very information rich so it takes ages to read. Sorry, no, I can’t put that on the website ‘cos it’s entirely OU copyright. Don’t forget that these are short answer questions: you’re not going to be able to write more than three or four sentences in your 7 minutes ie the answers required are very basic and to the point.

Now that the exam is worryingly close, I’m finally getting around to doing a lot of the revision that I’ve been meaning to do for a while now.

The first part of the exam consists of eight short questions which should take about an hour to answer thus less than 8 minutes a question or, in reality, more like 5 by the time you subtract thinking time. For this part the course team advice is to check the glossary terms for each book and the learning outcomes for each chapter, read the section summaries and attempt the Questions at the end of each chapter. So, what I’ve been doing is going through the PDFs to create a single document containing just the learning outcomes and the section summaries. I tried this out last night against the specimen exam paper and there appears to be sufficient information in my super-summary to answer just about all of them. Collectively they’re 40% of the paper or 5% each.

Part 2 is a data handling question and aside from looking over the TMA comments on that type of question there’s not a whole lot of preparation that you can do for this. This gets 30% of the marks.

Finally, there’s the essay questions which are on Book 1, Chapter 4: Digestion and absorption of nutrients, Book 2, Chapter 3: The endocrine system, Book 3, Chapter 2: Circulation and finally Book 4, Chapter 3: Stress. For these I’m running up my own notes (digestion and stress are done, endocrine and circulation being done possibly by the weekend). There are notes on the latter three on the course forum and I’ve my own notes on the digestion system published here already (the others will follow during the coming week). This counts for 30%.

You only need to do one of the essays. Whilst in theory you could revise for only one, two seems safer to me and I’ll be doing digestion (because we’ve already done a TMA on it), circulation (because I did the cardiovascular diseases [SK121] course earlier this year) and stress because it looks easy to do. The endocrine system currently looks pretty complicated to me but I’ll see after I’ve done the notes.

Once I’ve completed the bumper summary and the chapter notes I’ll be working through both of them and seeing if I can answer the end of chapter questions and the past paper ones. I’m not planning on writing out complete answers as such though as that’s just too time consuming.

One of the problems with the paperless age is that you don’t have a little piece of paper to prove that you did whatever you said you did.

Despite having left France at the start of 2009 to live in Northern Ireland again, we still have problems with both tax and social services administrations. Today it was time to tackle offices in two different countries once more.

First off was the French taxation people who basically seem to have the view that nobody leaves France and that even if they do, the rest of the world is basically just an extension of France. I came across this several years ago when someone posted a question about it on one of the French forums. Basically her problem was that she had left France almost a year before, her post redirection service was running out and several French departments wouldn’t accept that she’d left so were therefore continuing to send her assorted bills (and benefit payments). As it turned out, the only proof that she had really left which would be accepted was a Certificate de Residence from her mairie. Unfortunately, there aren’t any mairies outside France the the closest equivalent (ie her local council) had no such document that they could give her. In the end, she had to just let the redirection service run out and leave the various departments to work it out for themselves.

I’m merely at the first off-ramp from that particular road at the moment so today it was the turn of the French taxation people to have another form sent back to them pointing out that I haven’t lived there for well over a year now. Somehow I don’t think they’ll take any notice of that as they didn’t last year but I guess it’ll be out of my hands soon as my own redirection service is running out.

On the other side of the fence, getting fully into the UK system is proving to be equally difficult. This time last year the health service were refusing to believe that we intended to live here and were merely health tourists. Quite how one proves one’s intent to live somewhere (which is what they wanted us to do) is still beyond me but we wore them down in the end. Child benefit was particularly difficult and instead of the “couple of weeks” quoted initially it turned out to be closer to four months. The particular problem with that is that you need the Child Benefit number for other forms and the lack of it complicates life no end. The other little problem is that we just couldn’t work out a way to tell the French child benefit equivalent that we’d left and they should stop paying us and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were still paying us.

At the moment, we’re working on the Child Tax Credit people who said last October that they couldn’t process our claim without a Child Benefit number, then they said almost two months ago when we finally could give them the Child Benefit number that it would take a “couple of weeks or so” to pay. Now they say they’ve no record at all of the claim!

Still, it’s nice to see European harmonisation of the taxation and social security systems. It would have been better to harmonise upwards in quality but I guess you can’t have everything.