OpenMusings » M257

Thwarted

Bryan Morton — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:26:09 +0000

S186 done & dusted, with the ECA submitted with about, oh, 5 minutes to spare. I think that’s a record for me in the “cutting it close” department. Enjoyed the course up to a point – the subject and course material I found fascinating, I was just hampered by a severe lack of time. Shouldn’t have any problems with passing it, but it’s not going to be as good a result as I could have got if I’d been able to give it my full attention.

With that done, attention switches back to M359. By my reckoning I’m about 3 weeks behind on the final stretch, so time to knuckle down and start working…

…except that the keyboard on my MacBook Pro has given up under the pressure of heavy-duty bashing. Or at least the ‘G’ key has – its keycap went flying across the room last week and hasn’t been seen since, so the laptop itself is winging its way back to Apple for a keyboard replacement. That’s anything between 2-5 working days until I have access to it again. One word: ARRRGH!

One last piece of news for this meandering post:

Considering that exam was done with pretty much no revision, I can’t complain about that result. Onwards! Sadly, the next unit will be the dreaded M253…

Approaching Exams

Bryan Morton — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:15:05 +0000

M257 officially comes to an end on Wednesday, with its 3-hour exam on Wednesday morning. Normally I’d be looking forward a distinction – I love programming units, they’re right up my mental alley – but this time around it ain’t going to happen. Not because of lack of understanding – I’ve got an OCAS of 97.35% going into the exam, and it should’ve been higher bar a very inflexible marking scheme on some of the assignments – but I haven’t been able to give the course the attention it deserves. A combination of the dread M359 and the arrival of a new baby in the house a week ago have kept me from even looking at an M257 textbook since January. I’m planning to give the specimen paper a thorough going-over tomorrow, but that’s it as far as my revision for the exam goes – meaning that realistically, I’m looking at probably a Pass 3 at best. The perfectionist in me is screaming that this just won’t do, but unfortunately for him reality has other ideas.

On the bright side, the course doesn’t count in the Honours classification for BSc Computing and Systems Practice, which is the degree I’m working towards. The only slightly-related downside is that M359 does, and that could well be a trainwreck of note…

Being Overly Picky

Bryan Morton — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:41:40 +0000

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…

Advance Planning

Bryan Morton — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:36:32 +0000

M257-TMA04 is done, bar going through it for a ‘sanity check’ in a week or so – I tend to miss obvious problems if a read through an assignment too soon after completing it. This raises an interesting problem: once Unit 10 is out of the way, that’s M257 done & dusted – but the exam isn’t until June. So just how do I keep the information learnt since October in my head for another 5 months, without the constant kick that TMAs give you to learn things?

The idea was to get M257 finished before M359 began, and I’ve managed that. But it’s a bit of a double-edged sword – if I now bury myself in SQL, I’ll have forgotten all things Java by the time the exam comes around. So here’s the plan: just for once, I’ll be doing the optional, non-assessed Case Study units for M257, as just working through them should help keep things fresh in my head. I’ve also obtained all the M257 & M254 past papers that I can, and I’ll aim to do one of them a month until the exam – should also help me to identify the areas of the course that I skipped over a bit too quickly (I’ve been very lax on note-taking this time out, which may well come back to haunt me). Put all that together, and there should be enough Java work to keep me on course for a decent exam score without getting too much in the way of work on M359.

That’s the theory, anyway. I’ll tell you in August if it worked…

Perpetual Bewilderment

Bryan Morton — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:35:39 +0000

So I’m currently plugging away at TMA04 for M257. There’s something unique about programming questions that can be eternally infuriating – it’s quite possible to bang away at a question, or portion of one, for hours on end without making any progress before you get that little “ding!” of inspiration that lets you finish the task in 5 minutes.

Let’s take, for example, Q3(c). I started that at around 7pm on Tuesday evening. At 1am I finally gave up and went to bed – and had code fragments floating through my head, with one half on my brain still trying to puzzle out the question while the other tried desperately to get to sleep. Work on Wednesday involved several piles of scrap paper on the desk with little Java snippets scribbled down to try later. The solution finally arrived in my head, with an almost-audible “hallelujah!”, at around 8pm Wednesday evening. It’s now coded, screenshotted and safely in the solution document – but I’m fairly certain all that aggravation should be worth more than 19 marks.

Not the end of the story, sadly, as Q3(e) is now giving me the same problems. And that’s only worth 12 marks. Aargh.

Something You Don’t See Every Day…

Bryan Morton — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:17:08 +0000

Probably the only time I’ll ever see that, so I’m going to enjoy the feeling while it lasts.

Uh-oh…

Bryan Morton — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 09:13:22 +0000

Hmm. I sense an unfortunate coming-together of deadlines across three courses that means October / November is going to be hectic…

T224 Exam: 16th October
S199 ECA deadline: 31st October
M257 TMA01 deadline: 15th November

I think my one-month break is about to come back and bite me. The original plan had been to have S199 completed by the end of September – that would have given me 2 weeks to revise for the T224 exam, then into M257 with plenty of time to meet the TMA deadline.

Unfortunately, S199 is proving to be the trickiest 10-pointer I’ve done so far, and it looks like I won’t be finished with it by the end of the month. The revision time for T224 is non-negotiable, so I’ll have to finish S199 after the exam – which then leaves me very short on time to complete the first few M257 units & TMA01. Argh.

Should’ve started M257 when the books arrived, I guess…

Surprise Arrival

Bryan Morton — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 09:31:41 +0000

Nice little surprise arrived with me last week, as the first M257 mailing hit my doorstep – completely unexpected, as the course isn’t due to start until 6th October. If I wasn’t enjoying my short study break so much, it would be a great opportunity to get ahead a little…

Materials look straightforward enough – the first few units are going back over the history of Java and giving overviews of its use in projects large- and small-scale before it finally gets on to the coding again. Looking forwared to using a “real” IDE (NetBeans) instead of BlueJ, not so sure about some of the topics they’re due to cover later in the course!