The countdown begins...

I have just submitted my last coursework assignment hurrah! and there is a feeling of being on the home straight.   I now have 5 weeks until the exam on June 14th.  

One of the good things about the Open University is that they give you a huge amount of support not only throughout the year but in preparation for the exam. It's different from being in college or uni and having day to day interaction with tutors and other students, and many of us haven't sat an exam for a good many years!  So, they don't just say "OK you're exam date is 14th June, you have revision time allocated in the schedule".  Oh no.

We have a whole booklet about preparing for the exam, the structure of it and on which chapters the questions will be based. They tell us what the markers will be looking for and all sorts of other useful tips including "make sure you can write for 3 hours with the pen you have chosen, without your arm seizing up" or words to that effect. We have specimen exam papers and can get past papers off the website. We have a 6 hour revision day school in two weeks time.

It makes it feel much less daunting, and my tutor said yesterday that it is a lot harder to fail the exam than pass it!

So, I have made myself a revision timetable for the next 5 weeks, starting today with preparation ie. reading the OU information and thinking about how I'm going to set out my notes.  I have decided on the chapters I am going to concentrate on - sorry Freud but your psychoanalytic stuff got ditched!

I've decided (after reading the chapter on memory!) to do a bit of each subject each week, rather than a week on Learning, a week on Perception or whatever. That way I keep topping up the information.

In some kind of masochistic way I'm almost looking forward to the challenge!