Thursday 7 August 2008

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?

1 comment:

Mary said...

My experience of Comp & Maths OU courses is that the TMAs are relatively easy and students get good results by following examples in the text.
Exams are usually very different to TMAs, I think that they examine the learning objectives of the course so on the Comp. side are a lot more theoretical. We had a warning of this from the spec. and Oct 2007 exams.
My starting point for revision is to copy the learning objectives sections from each unit and then put together notes of how I could respond to each one if asked to demonstrate that I understood it.
It has worked well so far...