Wednesday, September 15, 2010

SSC1 - Social Sciences

Discover Our Arts & Sciences Programs My last course INC1 was, as I have stated, a pain in the butt. I needed to read each chapter in full as shown in the course of study because I had no competency with the material. But what happens when you are reading through a chapter and feel you already know some of the material and feel you're losing some time to redundancy? This has started to happen with my social sciences course.

Now mind you, I don't know too much of the material already, but there is a chapter here and there that I feel I may be already competent. And since these chapters are fairly long I could save quite a bit of time if I could somehow "skip" these areas. So I am going to offer a tip on how to do this for those of you enrolled at the university.

Take the pre-assessment and view the coaching report. If you see an area where you scored 100% or even in the 90% range, skip that area and move on. There are also section/chapter quizzes you can use to gauge competency; if I score high on a chapter quiz, I move on to the next chapter. And If you scored really high on the pre-assessment itself, you can probably just schedule your exam and get the course completed quickly.

I take my exam next week.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

INC1 - A Nightmare In Science

Discover Our Arts & Sciences Programs I took my exam for Integrated Natural Sciences (INC1) today and passed, although not by much. Do I care? No. Just glad to have it out of the way.

For those of you enrolled at WGU who haven't yet taken INC1 let me explain roughly what it is: Physics, Nuclear Physics, Chemistry, Genetics, Earth Sciences, Biology, Evolution, Ecosystems, and Astronomy all rolled into one gigantic science course. The information was well presented and I have no problems with the course itself; I learned a great deal and got a kick out of knowing that while kissing someone our atoms aren't actually touching.

The problem I had was the test was very specific for so much information. Usually a test for a course that covers alot of ground asks more general questions such as "what is an igneous rock?" instead of "(insert chemical equation here) what element is this?" There were also a great deal of multiple answer questions so you MUST know your stuff.

While difficult, you will learn much about the world around us and within us and I rather enjoyed some sections such as ecosystems. But chemistry and genetics be damned...

This exam sucked - I'm not going to lie. 76 questions of pure hell.