Foreign Perspectives

Once you’ve decided to do a new course, there are a few hurdles that you need to get over if you want to be sitting there on the day of the final exam.

First of those is the business of actually getting the application form completed and off to the university. Although in most years I get that away fairly early on in the game and, in particular, before the results of the preceeding course have arrived, this year it was very much a last minute thing. The reasons for that were specific to me but I’m sure that there are a considerable number of dropouts from courses through simply not getting the application in to begin with.

The second big hurdle is once you get the initial wad of information about the course sent to those registered for it. In the case of the Open University the books seem to be arriving earlier with every year that passes. This early arrival means that there can be several months of reconsideration time before the course formally begins. Although that early arrival is welcome in giving the opportunity of making an early start on the work it has the downside that you’re doing that work very much on your own and that lack of support combined with additional reconsideration time means that people drop out at that point too.

However, by far the biggest drop out trigger is the first assignment. One course I was on a few years ago went from 25 to 18 students as soon as the time came to do that first assignment and there were similarly large dropout rates on other courses. That’s a shame really as most of the time the first assignment doesn’t count towards the final mark so you may as well have a go at it. I really hadn’t got much of a clue as to how to proceed with the first assignment of my course last year yet I picked up a mark of 90% on it: how well you think you’re doing doesn’t necessarily correspond to how well you’re actually doing. Although there can be dropouts around the other assignments that first one is by far the most significant in most courses: most people that survive it are still there for the final exam.

So with the submission date coming up this Friday I’ll be expecting to see a few less faces at the tutorial next time.