Lacking in Relevance

I tweeted yes­ter­day my first frus­tra­tion with my cur­rent Open Uni­ver­sity law course: the indi­vidual and the state. I’ve hit the first bit that feels like filler — which inter­est­ingly, isn’t the point where other stu­dents have com­plained that some­thing feels like filler.

Other stu­dents com­plained much earlier on. Right at the start of the course, where there were a long series of units where it wasn’t clear how their con­tent would become rel­ev­ant. I found them hard work, but I get their over­all rel­ev­ance now. I also appre­ci­ate that it’s use­ful to try to grasp the fla­vour of an ele­ment of a sub­ject in isol­a­tion, and that the course mater­i­als evolve from year to year, and that can leave struc­tural anom­alies — bits that used to have more rel­ev­ance than they seem to cur­rently have. But unless there’s a hint as to why the sec­tion you’re study­ing will be use­ful later on, then there can be the feel­ing that you’re in the middle of someone else’s infodump.

I would not expect to be marked well on an essay that didn’t, in its open­ing remarks, address both what it was about to dis­cuss but also the rel­ev­ance to the ques­tion being asked. Think­ing about that, unfor­tu­nately, has made me real­ise I am actu­ally in someone else’s infodump right now — and because there’s a ques­tion in the exam at the end of it, for each year I have past papers, this is a moment at which all I can do is suck it up and decide to answer the upcom­ing ques­tion, or not.

This is not in any way as bad as a course, I pre­vi­ously stud­ied, where my views are on the record (and seem­ingly vin­dic­ated by more recent present­a­tions), but still, it’s the first part of the course that feels as if it’s stepped off the over­all plan. I’m in the middle of an infodump right now, and my instinct says that the best thing for me to do is to ignore this sec­tion of the course and run the per­cent­ages — while a quarter of the exam in Octo­ber is a big slice to throw away right now without even revis­ing it, my instinct says that if the sec­tion being stud­ied lacks focus, then the exam ques­tion is impossible to predict.

I think I can spend my time bet­ter, study­ing other things than a sec­tion that, while appears to be rel­ev­ant, lacks the nar­rat­ive that iden­ti­fies con­tent with focus and rel­ev­ance. Even if there’s a guar­an­teed exam ques­tion bur­ied in there.

I don’t have time to dig for it, though. I appre­ci­ate it. But to hit the exam ques­tion, I would need a shot­gun. And exams in my exper­i­ence emphas­ise your rifle skills.