Financial & Travel Musings

With the economy being in the doldrums at the moment a lot of people are in a position to look at the qualifications with a view to improving them.

One of the problems in doing that is that you really don’t want to be starting off on a major new qualification and then have to abandon it when you get that job you were hoping for. However, all is not lost as there are lots of accredited online degrees out there at the moment.

Don’t think that you need to limit yourself to also-ran universities either. Many of the big names offer a range of online courses these days in all sorts of fields and at various levels.

The good point about all of these is that should you manage to land that ideal job “too soon” you can continue on with your self-improvement programme.

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One of the problems that we all have these days is that basic qualifications just aren’t enough to get us into the various schools that we’d like to go to.

Instead, what we have are the likes of LSAT prep courses which are designed to get you over the hurdles in the form of aptitude tests hat the specialist schools now place in front of us seemingly at every stage. Do they work though? Well, yes, to a point. What they will do beyond you looking at sample LSAT tests on your own is briefing as to what is being looked for in each type of question and that’s often far from obvious.

What they won’t do is to do anything like double your score. Thanks to the work that the schools put into developing these tests, it’s largely impossible to significantly increase your score. However, that’s not always necessary. Think about the simple case where, say, 50% is a pass, 49% is a fail and you’re consistently getting something like 46 or 47. You don’t need to double your score: you just need to add a few percentage points. That’s the case for a surprisingly large number of people sometimes.

The other reason why it’s worth looking into is simply because everyone else is doing it. The overall effect of that is that the schools adjust the pass mark upwards to take account of this which in turn means that we all need to up our game.

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If you’re trying to sell sell textbooks it’s often quite a sobering experience as to the value of second hand books.

The problem, of course, is that discounting is rife thanks to the likes of Amazon and that really drops the price of second hand books. However, that’s not always the case and sometimes rarity lifts the price considerably even of something that you would think obsolete.

For instance, just a few nights ago I realised that I needed to refresh my memory of calculus for a course that I hope to start in the new year. As it happens I still have a copy of a mechanics textbook printed way back in 1970. It’s seriously dated and although the theory is fine the practical parts use outdated units. Anyway, I figured that since it was a textbook with origins back to the 1940s there would be an updated edition of it around. There isn’t unfortunately but that same book is available second hand for about twice what I paid for it new 30 years ago yet for half that amount you can get a brand new copy of a similar textbook.

Even more interesting is a course that I looked at as a child in the 1970s which is now on sale for several hundred poundswhereas newer versions of the course are available for maybe twenty or thirty pounds. So, often you’ll find that the value of your course texts will increase over time.

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