M364 result
I had my exam for M364 on 8th October 2014, at Hotel Rembrandt in Weymouth. I went in feeling pretty good, because I’d studied the material against a checklist my tutor provided, and I’d done a few old exam papers that made me feel very confident!
I did do well at the exam, but I lost one or two points on each question, and it brought my score down a little bit; my OES was 80 while my OCAS was 84. Annoyingly, so few percent away from a Distinction!
The exam experience
I always used to finish exams at school very early, so I took my time carefully in this one, but still ended up using all but five to ten minutes of the time. Make sure you look carefully at the weighting of marks to each part of the exam and plan your time accordingly. Also, some exams have a recommended allowance of time for each question on the front. If you want to save some time at the end to go back and look over the paper, make sure you account for that too!
The exam was in the ball room, and there wasn’t too much in the way of noise from the rest of the hotel, even though the exam ran from the end of breakfast to well into lunchtime for the Rembrandt. There were students from several very different modules in the exam room – only one other girl from M364 was there – and we were all seated at allocated desks in three or four rows down the room.
My one regret is that while it was lovely to use my new fountain pen, which stops me from pressing too hard when writing and getting wrist cramps too early on in the exam, it was very noisy and I felt pretty bad for the girl in front of me. I hope I didn’t distract her.
Other thoughts and tips about the exam
- Put your phone on silent, turn off any alarms, and turn it off. You might be asked to leave it on the back table in the exam room. If you’re apprehensive about bringing your phone to the exam venue, bring it anyway, because it probably looks more suspicious if you don’t hand one in.
- Take a bottle of water in with you.
- You can take food in with you – I’ve seen things like mints recommended because they keep you alert.
- Buy past papers and do them during your revision period! It doesn’t have to be under exam conditions, but they are really helpful for getting to know what questions will be in the exam. I just bought some past exam papers for T324 and T325 and it’s given me ideas for revision. They’re only £1.25 per paper, they come as a PDF and you can buy them here at the OUSA Online Store. (I’d love to help you, but please don’t ask me to share them; it’s against the T&Cs.)
- The staff attending the exam are there to help you and the ones at mine were lovely. Don’t be afraid to ask them anything!
T324 and T325
I think I picked up too much of a workload this year, with two level 3 courses alongside a full time job. I’m also pressuring myself to try and get Distinctions, as you have probably gathered.
These two courses have a lot of maths in them, which I’m not great at, but most of it is just making sure to memorise equations and stuff, so it’s not so bad. I’ve been making great use of Wolfram Alpha when doing my assignments and it’s been really good.
I think I like them pretty equally, though maybe I find T325 more interesting. I think my favourite subjects so far have been:
- T325 Block 2: Intellectual property and security issues – I find IP a really interesting subject along with its arguments, and IT security is something I deal with at work.
- T325 Block 3: Mobile broadband – I also work with mobile technology at work!
- T324 Block 2: Wireless sensor networks: an investigation – mostly because there was lots of useful learning on research and technical writing, just when I thought I couldn’t learn any more!
Anyway, I’m definitely not writing this blog post to procrastinate on T325 TMA03 (wink wink) so I’ll uh, I’ll get back to that now. Thanks for reading!