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…