Infinity
22 June 2009
Why do university text books have to be so expensive? I've been thinking of buying a couple of them for next year but I'd forgotten how expensive they were. It's going to cost me over £50 just to buy the two books that I should have bought last September. The high price was the main reason why I decided to just borrow them from the library for the whole year instead. I never intended to do that but it just sort of happened. I had expected to borrow them for a couple of months and then buy my own copies but I quickly ran out of money that semester. As long as no one reserved them (which no one did) I could theoretically keep them for the whole year, renewing them every four weeks. And that's exactly what happened. I'm not sure if that tactic will work next year, though. There will be new students starting on the course and I might have to compete for 'ownership' of the book. So it might just be easier to finally give in and buy my own. But as I said earlier, it's so bloody expensive! Plus, I'll probably have to buy the next volumes of the text books soon as we've almost covered all of the material in the current ones. I have two choices really: fork out over £100 for new text books; or fight the first years for them!
Among the books for my course, there's one that's not actually required but will probably be quite useful. It's the 2008 edition of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test exam paper. I'm planning to take the exam this December and get my first formal Japanese qualification. It's not required by the university but I've been planning on taking it for awhile now. The only thing is, I'm not entirely sure of which level I should take. I'm fairly confident that, with minimal revision, I could pass Level 3 (Level 1 being the hardest, Level 4 being the easiest). However, I wonder if I should try for Level 2 and just work a bit harder during the lead up to the exam? The only problem with that is that the jump from Level 3 to Level 2 is supposed to be massive (hence why they're changing the system in 2010). As the exam is only available once a year (and costs £60), should I risk it? I'll have to consider my options carefully before the application period opens in July.
Posted byHocchan at 12:15 am
