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cosmolinguist(Note to readers: The UK grading system is notoriously panic-inducing to Americans who are used to getting grades out of 100; here anything above 70 is a "first," i.e. as good as it gets.)
So I'm pretty sure the grades that are showing up on the student webpage now are official; there isn't that "these are provisional until the external examiners approve them" (or whatever it was) at the top of the page any more. And I'd really like to know what I've done before I have to pick classes for next year -- something I can finally do as of Wednesday or Thursday this week.
So to go with my 81 and 77 from last semester (I had three classes but only got two grades because the Arabic lasted all year), I appear to have...
65 in Arabic. Which is pretty good really! But it's my lowest score. Probably also the one I worked hardest for. It was all based on exams, three of which were in the last month or so of the year. I am terrible at writing but must have done okay on the others. I won't be taking Arabic again next year for lots of reasons, but I will miss it. I caught myself just yesterday reading out the letters on a sign (I don't know many words and Arabic doesn't write down most of its vowels so I can't really guess at what the words sound like, but I still like to practice my letters).
75 in History and Varieties of English. I came to uni thinking I was interested in sociolinguistics, and this was the option I could take that involved that in my first year. The historical linguiistics was the first half of the semester, taught by a lecturer I really liked: her slides and lectures were easy to follow, it was always really clear what was being asked of us, and it helps that I find Old and Middle English really interesting (and had studied both a bit before so I wasn't as overwhelmed by having a week for each, as some of my classmates (very understandably!) seemed to be.
The second half, varieties, was taught by someobody who doesn't know how to use slides effectively in a lecture (he'd rattle on for a while, I'd be frantically trying to take notes, then he'd skip quickly through a handful of slides going "this is what we've just covered" so I'd have to go back and look at them to fix my pathetic notes). He's also the one who gave me all the PDFs I couldn't read, and set reading quizzes on them every week. Each was worth 5%, and the week I couldn't get the PDFs readable in time to do it I just lost that 5% so this would have been another grade in the 80s without it. I am lucky to have enough of a cushion that it doesn't matter (and first year grades don't count anyway) but I still resent the fuck out of this because it's easy marks and I was denied them. I did email my disability advisor asking what to do about this when (not if, when) something similar happens in future and she said she was going to talk to somebody (about this specific case, I think) but never got back to me.
Luckily the second-year sociolinguistics-y options are taught by other people.
Oh, this class had the worst TA for seminars, too; she really bugged me and I skipped way more than I should've. I was so spoiled by the first semester where both my tutorials were fun to go to, taught by friendly people who learned our names and always made it really clear what was expected of us; this semester was...not like that. The other two were okay, but this one rubbed me up the wrong way.
80 in Study of Meaning (this is mostly semantics, with about three lectures at the end on pragmatics). I really enjoyed this class, which is all down to the lecturer. It swamped us in technical language, mostly Greek-derived words often very similar (there was about a week where I knew the difference between metonymy and meronymy but that's it) that were really difficult to shove into my head. The lecturer was great though; she was well-aware that she had a lot of confusing stuff to shove into first-years' heads and she did it very gently. She even had to teach us logical notation which I think almost everybody hated. I didn't, but I am not planning on doing a lot more!
I really liked the few lectures at the end about pragmatics, though, and I might do more of that (it's also proved useful for arguing with TERFs on Twitter or with difficult people who turn up to social things that I am at!). I really liked this lecturer generally; if she can make me happy with semantics I'd probably like anything she teaches, but as she's head of the department for this upcoming academic year she won't be lecturing.
87 in The Sounds of Language. I do not understand this at all. I hated this class for most of the year. It was mostly phonetics, with a bit of phonology at the end. It took me a long time to figure out this lecturer too; at first I didn't think I liked her very much but by the end of the semseter I really did. We got off to the wrong start when she announced she doesn't put the lecture-capture recordings online, which all my other lecturers have so far, and which was a tremendous problem for me because the lectures and slides were really dense with information, including a lot of detailed stuff (weird IPA symbols, parts of the vocal tract we have to learn, etc) which were impossible for me to see even sitting in the front row. I did have the slides, but hers were pretty minimalist so you'd miss a lot if you just had them to look at, and she did a lot of pointing-at-things-with-her-mouse (white on white-backgrounded slides so I had no fucking chance; I can't even see a mouse like that on a cmoputer that's in front of me) so she'd, for example, demonstrate whatever speech sound we were learning about and then wave the mouse in the direction of its IPA symbol on the slide.
But! I definitely like phonology (which is more abstract, it's about things like "what combinations of sounds are allowed in a language") more than phonetics (all this stuff about noises and symbols), and she was actually incredibly proactive and amazing about coming up wiht a disability-friendly alternative to me for an in-class exam the rest of the students had to do. I actually really enjoyed the assignment, stressful as it was -- this is the one where I got to transcribe something in my own accent and then talk about how it differed from the Southern British English we'd been studying in class.
It was our first assessed work in that class though (this also had busywork-to-prove-you'd-done-the-reading every fortnight, but that was it) so having done that as a take-home exam,, with a deadline at the end of the teaching period, meant I had no feedback yet by the time I had to take the proper exam-period exam. And I was really nervous because I hadn't learned all the things we were supposed to. This was the class most heavily affected by the strikes for me, and another thing I didn't like about this lecturer was that she still expected us to do our readings and our little quizzes while we missed something like a third of the lectures. And it's really difficult to learn phonetics from reading about it, because it's like "here's this weird symbol, and here's how to make the sound with your mouth which you as an English speaker have never tried to do." I didn't understand a lot of it and I still don't.
So I genuinely have no idea how I got a grade like 87. Makes me laugh that it was in the class that I hated most this semester (though honestly kexcept the first half of HVE I couldn't say I enjoyed any of them as such; it was a slog of a semester but that's the way it goes sometimes, especially in your first year). I can only attribute it to getting lucky with multiple-choice questions on the exam! And with the take-home thing, I was allowed a dictionary, which makes the transcriptions pretty straightfoward, but if I remember correctly the mark was pretty heavily weighted in favor of the final exam so I must have done better than I thought there!
So now next to "Academic Year 01" at the bottom of this page on my student website, it says "Year Mark 77.667," and yes, the next column that says "Weighting %" is blank because first-year grades don't count, but it still feels good.
So I'm pretty sure the grades that are showing up on the student webpage now are official; there isn't that "these are provisional until the external examiners approve them" (or whatever it was) at the top of the page any more. And I'd really like to know what I've done before I have to pick classes for next year -- something I can finally do as of Wednesday or Thursday this week.
So to go with my 81 and 77 from last semester (I had three classes but only got two grades because the Arabic lasted all year), I appear to have...
65 in Arabic. Which is pretty good really! But it's my lowest score. Probably also the one I worked hardest for. It was all based on exams, three of which were in the last month or so of the year. I am terrible at writing but must have done okay on the others. I won't be taking Arabic again next year for lots of reasons, but I will miss it. I caught myself just yesterday reading out the letters on a sign (I don't know many words and Arabic doesn't write down most of its vowels so I can't really guess at what the words sound like, but I still like to practice my letters).
75 in History and Varieties of English. I came to uni thinking I was interested in sociolinguistics, and this was the option I could take that involved that in my first year. The historical linguiistics was the first half of the semester, taught by a lecturer I really liked: her slides and lectures were easy to follow, it was always really clear what was being asked of us, and it helps that I find Old and Middle English really interesting (and had studied both a bit before so I wasn't as overwhelmed by having a week for each, as some of my classmates (very understandably!) seemed to be.
The second half, varieties, was taught by someobody who doesn't know how to use slides effectively in a lecture (he'd rattle on for a while, I'd be frantically trying to take notes, then he'd skip quickly through a handful of slides going "this is what we've just covered" so I'd have to go back and look at them to fix my pathetic notes). He's also the one who gave me all the PDFs I couldn't read, and set reading quizzes on them every week. Each was worth 5%, and the week I couldn't get the PDFs readable in time to do it I just lost that 5% so this would have been another grade in the 80s without it. I am lucky to have enough of a cushion that it doesn't matter (and first year grades don't count anyway) but I still resent the fuck out of this because it's easy marks and I was denied them. I did email my disability advisor asking what to do about this when (not if, when) something similar happens in future and she said she was going to talk to somebody (about this specific case, I think) but never got back to me.
Luckily the second-year sociolinguistics-y options are taught by other people.
Oh, this class had the worst TA for seminars, too; she really bugged me and I skipped way more than I should've. I was so spoiled by the first semester where both my tutorials were fun to go to, taught by friendly people who learned our names and always made it really clear what was expected of us; this semester was...not like that. The other two were okay, but this one rubbed me up the wrong way.
80 in Study of Meaning (this is mostly semantics, with about three lectures at the end on pragmatics). I really enjoyed this class, which is all down to the lecturer. It swamped us in technical language, mostly Greek-derived words often very similar (there was about a week where I knew the difference between metonymy and meronymy but that's it) that were really difficult to shove into my head. The lecturer was great though; she was well-aware that she had a lot of confusing stuff to shove into first-years' heads and she did it very gently. She even had to teach us logical notation which I think almost everybody hated. I didn't, but I am not planning on doing a lot more!
I really liked the few lectures at the end about pragmatics, though, and I might do more of that (it's also proved useful for arguing with TERFs on Twitter or with difficult people who turn up to social things that I am at!). I really liked this lecturer generally; if she can make me happy with semantics I'd probably like anything she teaches, but as she's head of the department for this upcoming academic year she won't be lecturing.
87 in The Sounds of Language. I do not understand this at all. I hated this class for most of the year. It was mostly phonetics, with a bit of phonology at the end. It took me a long time to figure out this lecturer too; at first I didn't think I liked her very much but by the end of the semseter I really did. We got off to the wrong start when she announced she doesn't put the lecture-capture recordings online, which all my other lecturers have so far, and which was a tremendous problem for me because the lectures and slides were really dense with information, including a lot of detailed stuff (weird IPA symbols, parts of the vocal tract we have to learn, etc) which were impossible for me to see even sitting in the front row. I did have the slides, but hers were pretty minimalist so you'd miss a lot if you just had them to look at, and she did a lot of pointing-at-things-with-her-mouse (white on white-backgrounded slides so I had no fucking chance; I can't even see a mouse like that on a cmoputer that's in front of me) so she'd, for example, demonstrate whatever speech sound we were learning about and then wave the mouse in the direction of its IPA symbol on the slide.
But! I definitely like phonology (which is more abstract, it's about things like "what combinations of sounds are allowed in a language") more than phonetics (all this stuff about noises and symbols), and she was actually incredibly proactive and amazing about coming up wiht a disability-friendly alternative to me for an in-class exam the rest of the students had to do. I actually really enjoyed the assignment, stressful as it was -- this is the one where I got to transcribe something in my own accent and then talk about how it differed from the Southern British English we'd been studying in class.
It was our first assessed work in that class though (this also had busywork-to-prove-you'd-done-the-reading every fortnight, but that was it) so having done that as a take-home exam,, with a deadline at the end of the teaching period, meant I had no feedback yet by the time I had to take the proper exam-period exam. And I was really nervous because I hadn't learned all the things we were supposed to. This was the class most heavily affected by the strikes for me, and another thing I didn't like about this lecturer was that she still expected us to do our readings and our little quizzes while we missed something like a third of the lectures. And it's really difficult to learn phonetics from reading about it, because it's like "here's this weird symbol, and here's how to make the sound with your mouth which you as an English speaker have never tried to do." I didn't understand a lot of it and I still don't.
So I genuinely have no idea how I got a grade like 87. Makes me laugh that it was in the class that I hated most this semester (though honestly kexcept the first half of HVE I couldn't say I enjoyed any of them as such; it was a slog of a semester but that's the way it goes sometimes, especially in your first year). I can only attribute it to getting lucky with multiple-choice questions on the exam! And with the take-home thing, I was allowed a dictionary, which makes the transcriptions pretty straightfoward, but if I remember correctly the mark was pretty heavily weighted in favor of the final exam so I must have done better than I thought there!
So now next to "Academic Year 01" at the bottom of this page on my student website, it says "Year Mark 77.667," and yes, the next column that says "Weighting %" is blank because first-year grades don't count, but it still feels good.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 09:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 10:15 am (UTC)(I panicked when I got my first assignment back in my undergraduate degree here: I got 75% or similar on it, and nobody had explained the different weighting to me.)
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 09:32 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 10:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 11:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 02:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 02:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 03:48 pm (UTC)Also, thank you for explaining why teaching myself IPA is so hard:
"here's this weird symbol, and here's how to make the sound with your mouth which you as an English speaker have never tried to do."
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 09:38 pm (UTC)The only other thing I can think to recommend is that it helps if you learn what the different places of articulation and manners of articulation are. If I at least understand what a fricative means and where pharyngeal is, I can understand the sound/symbol combination a little easier, even if I can't produce a pharyngeal fricative very well myself.
Always happy to talk about this if you've got questions or whatever.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 04:02 pm (UTC)14, 15 and 16 = 1st class
11, 12 and 13 = 2:1
8, 9 and 10 = 2:2
5, 6 and 7 = 3rd
4 = "pass"
1-3 = fail
0 = work not submitted.
Fortunately in 2000 the university went to the more regular for the UK class mark system... Presumably cos points to 16 didn't allow for finer granularity of marking and probably relied on lecturers fudging it. Some tutors approved, others Clear Liked The Way It Had Always Been :D
I failed spectacularly!
Anyhoow, your grades are astounding considering you didn't have your access tech till nearly Xmas and you had tutors who were teaching in a poorly accessible way. I am not sure that it is OK for tutors to decide not to upload the recordings - other universities, such as where I work now simply doesn't allow opt out. If you don't want to be recorded, work elsewhere. If you have good reason to opt out, you edit the recording promptly and provide alternatives.
I think part of this success is that you are clever, but also that as a more mature student you know what does and does not work for you, you know how to work, know how to largely stay motivated, how to cope with difficulties early on and to stick with stuff that is initially very hard. You can see the short and the long term, "this too shall pass".
I still wish to shoot MR PDFs. I saw those fucking things and they are unacceptable for sighted students nevermind for teaching a visually impaired person such as yourself.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 09:45 pm (UTC)Oh I forgot to say, apparently I as a DASS-registered student have access to the lectures somehow anyway (this is what my advisor said when I asked her about it) but I never did figure out how to make that work. Still, they could have bloody told me; it'd have made me less hostile to that lecturer and less stressed during the lectures.
I entirely agree with you that being a mature student has made this a lot easier for me. I really want to be there, I know a ton of traps I fell into last time I tried uni and I did a pretty good job of avoiding most of them. For all I've had a lot of "non-studenty" problems like expensive home repairs to deal with during the academic year, I've also not had to build a social life from scratch or worry about where I'm going to live next year and I do not envy the students that stuff at all! Having some stability in my life makes it a lot easier to, like you say, see both the short and the long term.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-24 12:23 pm (UTC)FWIW, I'd chase disability adviser about the stuff she's not got back to you on, balls get dropped, now is the time to prod cos she might remember and sort it, and if not, you can then escalate cos you are ENTITLED to that support. Squeaky wheels and all that.
I found my final year of uni much easier than my previous 4 (yay 5 yrs for 1 3yr UG degree cos failing chem and repeating yr, and a yr out to play ortho hospital roulette) cos I was living with just Kim in a house to ourselves (cheaper than 2x student rooms). So it was mostly clean, Kim cooked real food, I didn't have to live on toast/bananas cos the kitchen was a cesspit. I didn't have epic cleaning - Kim did the tasks I was by then FINALLY told not to even attempt. Partners generally care about you so there isn't that "fuck you selfish" shit you get in student houses. And I'd got to the no fucks stage, so I took no shit from the uni, TOLD my tutor I wasn't doing groupwork anymore and got separate assignments (I shall not rant about my coursemates disablist and nasty abuse) so it was me + the tutors who were all but one fine. Oh and acquired myself a pet professor who pointed out my language impairment and was swearily helpful in enabling me to identify my issues and improve them!
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 06:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 07:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 10:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-22 10:32 pm (UTC)(FWIW, sometimes if everything goes to hell in your final year, or you are one mark off the next grade boundary at the end of your degree, they will review your first year grades and use them alongside other closer scrutiny of your overall performance. So not always totally irrelevant :-) )
Also, don't be too hard on the tutors who can't/don't learn your names - I cannot do it and have taught as many as 150 students in a single term before, it's sometimes an impossible task, and some people (like me!) are just horrible at retaining names - not for want of effort or care, I can assure you!
(no subject)
Date: 2018-07-23 07:52 am (UTC)