M256 - TMA 03

It seems like an age since there was any OU news, and now there are two pieces!
In addition to the M257 result, I have received the result for M256 TMA 03. A respectable 94%, which I am very pleased with. I did have an epiphany when I read my tutors comments wrt Question 2e - it was along the lines of '......ah! That's why it was worth so many marks' but it actually made sense - which is a good thing. I hate it when you have no idea what the issue was. :)

Reading the post-mortems on the M257 forum it seems like a lot of people got caught out on the exam - mainly the compulsory Question 1-10 section. It seems that there is something amiss when people averaging more than 90% on their TMAs are achieving only 58% on an examination - and I wonder whether this is usual for examinations. I can understand in the majority of cases that the scores achieved for TMAs will be higher than scores achieved for the exam - but largely think that attainment in TMAs should reflect attainment in exams. A discrepancy of over 30% between the two is something examiners should be worried about - isn't it?

M257 - The Result

Well the M257 results have arrived, and I passed with a Grade 2 (76%). I am happy with the result, and the breakdown showed that I scored between 70 and 84% for all questions on the paper (1-10, 11 and 12) making it a solid Grade 2 performance. Given this, I don't think that there was an awful lot I could have done to push up for the Distinction (9% is a great deal to claw back!), but want to congratulate the 10% of people who sat the exam who achieved the highest grade. I thought I would have been more disappointed....but guess that I do have a healthy perspective on these things after all.

Things to take from this, is that I obviously need to concentrate on packing the relevant information into my short answer style questions (1-10) if I am to achieve the highest grade, and that subtleties in longer answer questions (11 and 12) need to be accounted for properly. All in all though, a satisfactory outcome, and if I can achieve a similar mark for the M256 exam in October I think I will be happy.