Yesterday was the M359 exam, and it’s going to go down in history as one I’d rather forget. There are a few things that went wrong with this:
- I misunderstood the whole block 5 thing, and assumed that each presentation would do one part and ignore the other. By the time I figured out that this wasn’t the case (yesterday morning), it was too late to do anything about it – and lo, wasn’t Embedded SQL one of the 20-pointers. ::headdesk::
- What revision I had done was limited by the arrival of our second child a few months back – she’s still in the high-maintenance phase, and while my wife does what she can, it certainly takes two – usually at the expense of study / revision time, so I had far less revision done than I would like to have had.
- Come the exam, even some of the subjects I had covered – just this week, usually – just didn’t stick, leaving me looking at a number of questions, hugely frustrated as I knew these subjects but couldn’t get the information from brain to paper.

So. My TMA scores were enough to leave a Distinction a possibility, but with the exam performance I reckon I’m looking at a Pass 4 or Pass 3 at best. Part of me is almost hoping for a bare fail so I can resit next year when Real Life may have settled down a bit – otherwise I suspect I’ll be unlinking this one and picking another course to take its place in my Honours calculations. We’ll see what happens when the result comes out in 6 weeks or so.

In the meantime, the course mailing for M253 has arrived, and goes down in history as being the most pointless mailing ever. We get:
- A(nother) copy of the Online Applications CD. That makes 14 copies of it that I now have.
- A(nother) copy of the Electronic TMA guide. See above.
- A copy of the “course news”, telling my everything else I need will be available from the course website, including future course news-sheets.

First, we all have broadband these days, just set up a students’ download page and save the money all those damn CD’s cost. Likewise, a PDF of the Electronic TMA guide would be plenty useful enough for those that need it – I have enough courses under my belt now that I need neither. With those gone, there would be no need for the mailing at all, thereby removing the need for packaging or postal costs. The OU’s been going on for a while about the need to control costs & raise student fees – well there’s a place to start on the cost-cutting that I doubt too many people would care about. It would even be environmentally-friendly.