OpenMusings

TMA03 for M257 is back. Being a perfectionist, I’ve queried some of the lost marks on it – there were places were I was docked points despite the code I’d written doing exactly what was specified in the TMA question.

The problem is apparently the marking scheme, which expects the answer in a particular form and no other, and this frustrates me immensely – there’s no way of knowing in advance precisely how the course team expect the answer to be formatted, you can’t ask because it’s a TMA and an answer would give the game away, so you end up having to guess and hope you got it right.

I had the same problem with some questions on M255 (which I always queried, much to my tutors frustration), and once again I plan on querying anything along those lines here, in the hope (more than expectation) of getting an reason why the “official” method is better or more efficient than the ones I’ve used. I’m not holding my breath…

So M359 Relational Databases: Theory & Practice is my first foray into the world of Level 3 courses. Choosing it was an easy decision – I use databases a lot in my day-job (I work in IT), and as a hobbyist (there’s a MySQL database storing the contents of this site, and several others I own), so there’s a natural interest in knowing what’s going on behind the scenes and, hopefully, learning how to do things with them that the scripts I’m currently using won’t allow (although that would also mean learning PHP, and there are time issues that might get in the way of that). So there’s no lack of motivation for this course – a good thing, as it will also count towards my honours classification. Cue scary music.

The OU’s quite open about there being a gap between what’s expected of students at level 2 and at level 3, but there’s a particular word in the course description for this one that I hadn’t noticed before now:

This is a challenging Level 3 course. Level 3 courses build on study skills and subject knowledge acquired from studies at Levels 1 and 2. They are intended only for students who have recent experience of higher education in a related subject, preferably with the OU.

I’ve got the level 2 experience, I’m highly literate – but it’s that word “challenging” that worries me, and if some of the comments I’ve read on First Class about the course hold true, in this context it means “Sucker!! You’re going to fail!”. Hmm.

I have worked through one study session with the course so far, and all I can say at the moment is that there’s a lot of text to work through, although as is usual with Computing courses there are some good exercises along the way to back up the materials & having a natural interest in the subject does help the information stick in the mind. But for the next 8 months I’m going to have a string of warnings ringing in the back of my head…