Foreign Perspectives

Just seven days and it’ll all be over or, to put it another way, there just doesn’t seem to be enough time to pack in all the necessary revision.

Actually it does seem fairly doable at the moment and most of the stuff that seemed impossible to understand a few weeks ago makes sense now. I can even remember a reasonable chunk of it.

What I’ve been doing and will be continuing to do is to go over the 29 pages worth of learning outcomes and chapter summaries that I extracted from the books a month or so ago (if you’re doing it this year, you can get this from the TMA4 forum under question 4). I’ve been adding to that where the chapter summaries didn’t seem to be enough to meet the learning outcomes or if I came across a question that couldn’t be answered from them. That’s taking up a surprising amount of time although the amount of information I’m adding isn’t massive: mainly assorted variants of the HR-diagram.

I’ve been saving up a last look at the short questions from the past papers as I want to see if I can do them now. I’ve already gone over the multiple choice questions which, as I said a while back, are much the same as the short questions.

Quite soon I’ll be getting the contents of my exam bag assembled. As with the biology exam in June that’s going to include a calculator and my little drawing set. I don’t think there’s enough time to do a whole lot of drawing for the short questions as there’s only about 20 minutes altogether for each of the three questions on each book.

Given the way the exam paper is broken into so many different parts, it’s worth bearing in mind that the multiple choice questions are only worth 3.5% each so not being able to do one isn’t a disaster (though do guess if need-be: you’ve nothing to lose). Also on the short questions whilst each question might be worth 12%, there are so many parts that you’re looking at as little as 2% for some question parts and, from a quick glance through, never more than 4%. The best approach to these is not to look for the three questions in areas which you know most about but rather for the three questions that are made up of the greatest number of parts which you can answer. Bear in mind that you get points for part answers too. For example, in 2009 3% could be had by listing four ways in which an Elliptical galaxy will differ from the Milky Way; saying just that one is elliptical in shape whilst the other is a spiral and that one is older than the other would potentially net 1.5% without even thinking of anything complicated.

In amongst all that, I’ve started thinking some more about my options for doing the planetary science course (S283). It turns out that thanks to the November start date, it’s not too late to sign up for it this year although registration closes on the 14th so I can’t fiddle about too much. I think it’s probably viable for me in that last year I was able to finish off SK277 (which was my first ever biology course) by late March so there wouldn’t really be much overlap with S204. Moreover, by the time I was into the overlap period S283 would be into the biology half. Plus points on that are that it would get me the Certificate of Astronomy and Planetary Science and add to my planned chemistry cum physics degree. Downside is that it means dropping the option of doing the fossils and history of life course though presumably I’ll be covering that material in the evolution course in 2013/2014. I’d also be running it alongside the microbes course (S171) though I can string that out ’til April if need-be. Must see if I can get a quick look over the course materials tomorrow before doing anything drastic.