It’s been a crazy month. From the lead up to the product launch at work to know it seems like I’ve been doing nothing but back to back assignments for my Open University maths degree. So much so in fact that I’ve not had time to study, but only focus on the assignments themselves. It all started back with the second TMA for M337 (Complex analysis), which was a rush job and I got a much lower score on that than I would have liked.
Dot knows it is #TMA time and is “helping” – the complex plane is obviously comfortable ? #m337 @OUstudents pic.twitter.com/gkUrql6R81
— Dr Janet Bastiman (@Yssybyl) February 6, 2018
I then had two weeks until a computer marked assignment for MS327 and was going into this without having looked at any of the material in the book. As usual, I spent my commute trying to get through it, but barely made it a quarter of the way through before I realised I’d have to start working through the questions for the assignment. Computer marked assignments are very different from the tutor marked ones. You either select an answer from a choice of 4-6 potential results1 or by typing a numerical result. Therefore your answers are either correct or incorrect. There are no marks for method.
If you find yourself in this position, my best advice is always to do the unit quizzes. These are usually in a similar format and will get your brain in the right place for the assignment itself. In combination with the handbook and text books you should be able to follow how to get the answers from the questions, although please make time to go back and fill in the gaps as soon as you can.
With the iCMA out of the way, I then had a week for the third TMA of MS327. Fortunately on the same topics as the iCMA, but much more involved questions. This was a lot trickier to pick up. With the usual standing room only on the commute, I’ve had to spend a lot of evenings trying to do this around family time and study in the excessive noise of soft-play centres… not a great environment for thought!
So I’ve just submitted the MS327 TMA online and I’m pretty happy with it. Now I have two weeks to get the M337 TMA3 done and I’m a little more nervous about that. There isn’t time to go through the study materials and answer the questions, so I’ve given myself a week to get as far as I can and then I’ll dive into the TMA and see how far I can get…
On the plus side, the OU offers substitution on your assignments, so it’s okay to have a bad one and you’ll be allocated a score that’s the average of the other three. So I can still pull up my average for M337, as long as I do well on this TMA.
I’m really hoping that I can get time to get these to 100% before the exams in June!
- And these options are usually all pretty feasible and are the results of either applying an incorrect technique or making an error somewhere in your working. ↩
I’m doing M208 and MST210 this year and the workload is pretty high. I quit often spend too much time on the last third of each unit as thats where the really interesting stuff is, but I do question whether any of that will come up in the exam.
You’re right that the constant need to complete TMA’s means that you can focus too narrowly on them and not get a really good grip on the material.
I’m starting my revision schedule now so that I can go over the material again as there is simply too much to be able to leave it to the last 4 weeks.
Sounds like you have a plan 🙂 M208 and MST210 at the same time is quite a lot at once! Best of luck with the final TMAs and exams.