Foreign Perspectives

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.