DD203 - Power, Dissent, Equality : Results are in, and a week early!

There has obviously been a downward shifting of grade boundaries, because I somehow scraped a  Pass1.

The overall result from 385 students was,

	A	B	C	D	E/F/G
No. of Students	15	116	161	76	17
Percentage	4%	30%	42%	20%	4%

So, if only 4% got an overall 'A' in the exam the awards panel can move grade boundaries to meet whatever 'bell curve' of passes they aim for. It also means that the exam and marking must have been fairly rigorous  given the results above.

I did the two most popular questions and also the least popular,

Q1 = 225

Q3 = 276

Q9 = 39

My tutor suggested Q9 was the least answered historically and so if you attempted that at least the marker would be reading something different, and you may benefit from being slightly different from the norm. This may have been the case as Q9 was my best result.

Open University TMA Substitution Policy - What's the point ?

I guess I'm at a bit of a loose end waiting on the DD203 exam and module result, so I had a look at the substitution rules that apply to the TMAs, and apart from being incredibly complicated in arithmetic terms, they seem to make very little difference to the final result. 

The rules/instructions are HERE , in the download undergraduate and postgraduate taught modules assessment handbook (405KB) (PDF).

Section 2.8 is the one that 'explains' everything. Even with their example of a student failing to submit one TMA the overall average only shifted by 4.22%, and my overall TMA score only changed by about 0.5%, so hardly worth the effort of doing the calculation.

I would be interested to know if substitution has ever made a difference to an overall result in a way that would not already have come under consideration by the award review and appeals process.

I would go as far as to say that its possible that the existence of these substitution rules actually 'encourage' the non-submission of TMAs to the determent of students.

Any thoughts ?

DD203 - Power, Dissent, Equality : Three weeks to go unil the module result.

If the OU website is correct and "Your module result should be available by Friday 2 August 2013." then we have three weeks to go until we get our result.

However, there is some uncertainty with the words "should" and "by", does this mean 'maybe' and 'before'....... why can't then be more accurate with their language. 

DD301 to be replaced by DD313 : International relations: continuity and change in global politics

A world of whose making? (DU301)  which is the level 3 Politics Module  if you are studying for a PPE, is running for the last time in this October.

This module will be replaced by a new module, called International relations: continuity and change in global politics ( DD313 ) in October 2014.  Dr Daniel Conway is involved in the course production.

I haven't seen nay further information on this course but it looks interesting as a possible Level 3 Politics choice.

AA308 to be replaced by A333 : Key Questions in Philosophy

Thought and experience: themes in the philosophy of mind (AA308) which is the level 3 Philosophy Module  if you are studying for a PPE, is running for the last time in this October.

This module will be replaced by a new module, A333 Key questions in Philosophy, which has been approved by the University and it is planned that the first presentation of this module will be in October 2014. according to http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/a222/benefit.shtml

I haven't seen any information on A333 on the Open University website yet, but I would be interested to know more about it  because I haven't yet decided if I will do Economics or Philosophy yet at Level 3.