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Tuesday 25 July 2006

Back from the residential school

Back from the school, and starting to recover. I have an ECA (End of Course Assessment) in my hand, that needs to be completed with about a month.
The advice at the school was to do this as soon as you can, as a lot of the questions focus on the practical work you did, and your memory for the details fades quickly.

I had to write up one of the physics experiments and draw graphs, do some analysis of ecology data and a few other things. It wasn't that hard, but did take a day or two to get it all down.

With the ECA posted, we just had to sit back and wait. It takes a long time for it to be marked. I did the school in mid July, and got the result a few days before Christmas. By that time I couldn't remember much about it or where I might have gone wrong. I scored 77% for this one, which I was vaguely annoyed about. I thought I'd done better than that, and the feedback was of the general nature across all answers "Students answer this question well on the whole, those that failed ..."

Anyway, I decided by this time to just write it off, although I heard from one or two of my fellow students that they too were surprised at the level of the mark.

Onwards...

Friday 14 July 2006

Off to residential school

While working on my planets and fossils courses, the residential school material arrived.
I finished and submitted the planets/fossils so had plenty of time to read through the preparatory material, and get a copy of the good sciences guide to read too.

I found this second book very boring to read - partly because you shouldn't read it as a book, but use it to help you with specific topics. I also knew a fair bit about it.

I did worry before hand if I could tackle SXR103 without doing the main course, S103, but in the end decided my previous science experience would carry me through. The course was advertised as a standalone one, but it seems to have been a fairly recent change (last few years) so I wondered if it was just for the purposes of advertising.

I'm not going to write up my experiences, as I've already done so else where.
See the informal account and the more formal account I modified so the OU could use it directly.