Personal Blogs

Finished working through Unit 5 and really enjoyed the content.  It is all about forces acting on static objects including tension, friction, weight and normal reaction.  Really interesting stuff and very well presented.

On the back of completing the unit I answered the final question on TMA01 and have submitted it about 1 month ahead of schedule.  The TMA question was pretty time consuming as it is quite fiddly trying to produce force diagrams without any decent software, I probably should have just resorted to pen and paper but hey-ho, it is all done now.

Next step for me now is to put MST125 on hold for a week or two whilst I crack on with the written and computer parts of the end of module assessment for M140 which opens tomorrow.  I'm hoping to have it knocked down in a week or two and then I can pick straight back up with MST125 starting from unit 6.  

My grades are really good so far on M140 so I will spend some extra time on the EMA to push for a distinction.  I'm also on holiday for 3 weeks next month so need to get everything in order and try to get as far ahead as possible before then.

Made a start on the first two questions of TMA01.  Definitely feels a step up in difficulty from MU123.

I've also completed iCMA41.  Not sure if this is a new thing but it seemed to give me my score immediately.  Annoyingly I managed to get a couple of questions wrong for silly mistakes so looks like I only achieved 80% but can't see it confirmed anywhere on my assessment details.  Since it is only worth 2% of the continuous assessment part of the module I don't think I'll beat myself up too much.

The first two assessments opened on Monday this week, iCMA41 and TMA01.

I tackled iCMA41 first and correctly assumed that it was going to be quite a quick test.  I set aside an hour to do it.  I found it really simple and had completed it and triple checked it within 10 minutes or so.  I decided to also leave it a few hours and came back for one final check.  This seemed like a good approach considering how easily I seem to lapse concentration and make simple mistakes on the practice quizzes.

I was really happy with my answers and submitted them, I'd be really disappointed with myself if I dropped any marks as it was really basic. 

The next day I got on with the TMA.  I glanced through the paper straight away and found most of the questions fairly simple and set about solving them in my mind.  When I actually sat down to do it though, I really struggled with it.  It wasn't the questions that posed the difficulty but knowing what level of detail to include and how to strucure your answers.

I took to the forums and took heart in the fact that there were others suffering the same issues as me.  The moderators responses to my fellow students were helpful and helped guide me through.

Some of the questions were really simple and the question asked you to show your working out, it felt as though I was putting in far too much information for such a basic calculation but I took the view that this was deliberately simple and was there as a vehicle to improve your mathematical communication.

By the end of it I had written 10 pages, plotted a graph and filled in a few sections of another two pages.  It still seems an awful lot but reading through it several times I couldn't find anything to remove.  I got my girlfriend to read through it too and she could follow all of my reasoning which I guess is a good indication that I'm somewhere near.

I think the first TMA is deliberately vague on the amount of detail to include so you can get the super valuable feedback when the tutor marks it.  Even with this view in mind I still pondered over my answers for hours because I really don't want to drop any marks at this simple stage.

I keep getting thoughts in my mind of me, head in hands, sweating over some hieroglyphic-looking equations whilst trying to salvage every mark in order to get a decent grade in the final year.  All the while thinking back to the first TMA, how simple it was and kicking myself for not getting full marks.

All in all the iCMA took me an hour and the TMA took me 5 hours 30 minutes.