The result of my final module, DD303: Cognitive psychology is in, and it’s a 76 for my overall examinable score and 76 for my continuous assessment score. That gives me a pass 2 for this module and a 2:1 for my overall degree, which is now complete (A BA (hons) in Philosophy and Psychology). A level up from my 2:2 BA (hons) in Accounting from the University of Liverpool (the proper one), and significantly less marketable (which I count as a good thing, this one was for fun).

Breaking down my exam results and of the three questions I answered, I got a 2 Bs and an A.

I answered question 1, along with 1,024 other students, and got a B (as did another 389 students). For question 4 I got a B again (as did 173 other students of the 544 of us who attempted it). Finally, I answered question 9 and got an A along with 176 of the 826 other students who also attempted that question.

It was interesting to see how the questions broke down in terms of attempts and marks. 1,511 students attempted the exam (I am sure there were some no-shows as well) and had to answer one question from each of three sections (each section having three questions within it). Only 1,502 answers were submitted for the questions in the first section, 1,481 for the second section, and 1,504 for the third section. Most interestingly (to me) was that in the third section, only 50 people attempted the middle question (question 8) and in the second section, only 61 people attempted the last question (question 6).

I took the opportunity last week to sneak ahead a little bit, finishing off the final chapter of the textbook on applying cognitive psychology. I didn’t quite manage to finish off writing up my notes and reading the journals until yesterday, but now I just have TMA05, TMA06 and the exam ahead of me. I’ve given myself two weeks to write up TMA05, which is the project I undertook at residential school, then a week to write up TMA06 (a standard essay). This then gives me 4 weeks to study for the exam, a week per chapter that needs revising (including this week’s chapter).

I took the opportunity to sneak a week ahead in my psychology studies to try and get a jump on exam revision. This week (or is it next week?) was all about consciousness with a lot of material from other sections and previous psychology courses, as well as stuff from my philosophy modules. Alas it only looked at a small subsection of consciousness, but then it’s a topic that could take up an entire module if not an entire degree.

I got a little distracted shopping for shoes for a school reunion (I couldn’t quite justify the price tag on these when I would likely only wear them once) so didn’t start my week 26 studies until after lunch. I just about managed to squeeze in the chapter on cognition and emotion before having to start cooking dinner, thankfully the additional article was short and the chapter wasn’t particularly in-depth. Lots of different names that might come up in an exam, but not a great amount of detail to remember about each.

Hello Wason selection task, my old friend. After blasting through week 24 on decision making and judgements it was more familiar material for week 25 looking at reasoning. A lot more detail was given on deductive reasoning that in my philosophy course (which was a little odd), and I can’t see myself writing about it in the exam (too much potential for getting tied up in knots), but there was the familiar old Wason selection task to get me through. I am now back on track with the schedule and hope to get a little bit ahead next week so that I can polish off TMA05 and TMA06 by the end of August. That will give me all of September and the first week of October to revise for the exam on 6th October.

I took a week off to recover after residential school and am now playing catch up to get back on schedule (though finding out that I can get away with not knowing the content of the chapters currently being studied in order to tackle the exam effectively is affecting my motivation). Week 24 looked at judgement and decision making and covered a lot of the same ground that I had already studied as part of the rationality sections of my philosophy course. Good to see old Kahneman and Tversky popping up. I might include this chapter as a wild card in my exam strategy since I covered it in detail for my final philosophy essay.

Tour de Fleece starts on Saturday and I am off to residential school in just over a week’s time, so I took the opportunity of a grey and rainy day to get a little bit ahead on my reading. This week was looking at the cognitive processes involved in problem solving, and seemed to concentrate mostly on chess players. The accompanying journal article was a very catty review of another psyhcologist’s work, with the authors explaining in great detail how the other guy was wrong in his interpretation of their work. Highly amusing.

I was wondering when I would get this TMA back as it is the literature review and research question I will be investigating at residential school in 10 days, and I wanted to know whether I was on the right track. I was disappointed with the mark, a 69, but mostly with the comments about the suggested research question (the stuff about not mentioning serial vs parallel processing is fair enough – it never came up in any of the literature I reviewed and wasn’t an area that had come up in the course in this context at the time of writing the assignment, so I am giving myself a pass on having not mentioned it in the assignment, I can chuck it in when the experiment gets written up).

The research question I had chosen was one specifically suggested in the booklet giving all of the various options as something that would be valid and worth studying. Maybe I didn’t clearly enough identify that the design would be a 2×2 as my tutor said that only having one variable wasn’t sufficient at this level (there will be two variables as I understand it – ambiguity of word, and breadth of category). I’m not sure whether to query this with my tutor now or at residential school when I get there, given that the assignment that gets written up based on the experiment run at residential school is 30% of my examinable mark (which is 50% of my total course mark). I think I will raise it with my tutor now. Hopefully I just didn’t explain sufficiently that it will be a 2×2 design and I don’t have to completely rethink what I’ll be doing at residential school.

UPDATE: My tutor confirmed that I do have a 2×2 design, I just didn’t explain that well enough in my TMA.

A bit of an odd week this one, spread over two days because I had to prepare for the arrival of a house-guest and then run around panicking that the logistics that were thought to have been agreed for the Cotswold Way relay on Saturday hit a road bump. The chapter looking at language and thought was heavy on theories as to whether concepts necessary for learning language were innate or learned. For every type of theory that was proposed evidence was presented for how it wasn’t true or how it couldn’t be proved, so all a bit dissatisfying.

The topic this week was concepts, which disappointingly just ended up being theories as to how people form categories and place items within categories. There were no definitive answers to this, and the chapter ended up concluding that different theories might be used for different purposes and at different times. Oh, and different people categorise things differently too. Only the one journal article, which was mercifully short and pretty much just presented evidence of how children are essentialists.