Astrophysics: Tougher Than It Looks
In my post where I announced that I was Finally Ready To Start Posting
, I joked that I hoped the Astronomy course I was about to begin was going to be more challenging than just some easy multiple choice questions. The ironic thing is that the question papers for the course did include multiple choice questions (about 10 each) and they were indeed considered easy
(at least by the course tutor), but I still failed to get most of the marks available from them. For each question paper the multiple choice questions were worth 20 marks; on my first question paper I scored 5.
I spent just short of a week trying to answer my first set of multiple choice questions and struggled so much that I gave up on the course. I told The Boss that I was gonna mail the tutor and withdraw from the course the following Monday.This, of course, enraged The Boss who then called in a relative to stand over me whilst I forged ahead with the much harder
standard questions. If I had bothered to look at the standard non-multiple-choice before deciding that I was too stupid to be able to do the course, I would have realised that I I could cope with the standard questions much more easily.
Te pattern persisted through most of the course; me failing quite spectacularly on stuff that everyone else seemed to find quite trivial. Mostly because much of it had to do with spatial reasoning, which I'm not too good at any more. Thanks to The Boss for making me study at gunpoint, I've finally completed the course and I'm now hoping that I pass. I haven't got my final marks yet so I'm just keeping my fingers crossed for now.
Now that the course is over I've had enough time to figure out why Apache decided to kill itself and bring it back to life and its nice to have time to do other things: like going to bed before 4 a.m. It's just a shame I didn't get to post about the interesting stuff I was learning about whilst I was still learning it.
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