I already have a GCSE grade C in maths, which I obtained at school in 1992, so I figured that I could cope with going onto their next course MST121.
I would say, that MST121 appears to start a little above where you would leave off from a GCSE in maths. It's more like 1/4 the way into an AS level.
The course starts off with a basic maths skills update and written test or a 'TMA' (Tutor Marked Assignment in Open University speak).
The skills that we recapped on were:
factors and prime numbers
fractions, decimals and percentages
powers and roots
ratio and proportion
Straight forward so far...
Inequalities and formulas
some stats work
basic geometry and trig (I struggle with trig, all those radians and pies, but not the apple kind :-)
Then it starts to move away from GCSE type subjects and we start to get
Algebra
functions
detailed quadratic work
I guess these last two parts could be called pre-calculus and I certainly don't ever remember doing any of this at GCSE; hence, I suspect that this course jumps a level from GCSE and it moves at a good pace, as the course progresses.
You get to work on all of this prep material, before the course starts, proper.
I did this work over Christmas and the course officially started at the end of January.
The first part of the official course, begins with Chapters A0 and A1.
A0 is just some further prep work really, which was good, as I needed to practice using powers, logs etc, as I can never seem to remember the rules for using these maths concepts.
I did two TMA's, at the beginning of January and was pleasently suprised at the scores from those tests.
One was 93% and the other was 76%
The OU have a scoring process whereby, if you obtained an average of 69% or below, for your degree, you would get a 2.2 / 3rd class, depending on how low it was.
70% to 84% would be roughly a 2.1 and 85% or above, a 1st class.
So, a good start, but the maths was basic, so who knows how I'll cope with later parts.
More in my next post.
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