On Thursday, my M381 materials arrived. I went through the checklist and it was all there. But, apparently, I'm not allowed a study timetable; I have to get that from the course website when it opens on Monday. So it left me wondering what topic am I supposed to start with, Number Theory or Logic. I get the impression that you're supposed to begin on Number Theory, but I'll be interested to see what it has to say on Monday. Do I alternate one unit of each, or do I study right through one topic, then start on the other. Crucial questions, I'm sure you'll agree.
Then on Friday, M337 arrived. In fact, the whole course turned up rather than just the first half, which is quite unusual. I pointed out to the delivery man, that I'd only just met him the day before and made some joke about how it was strange that the Open University, full of presumably pretty clever people, didn't have the common sense to send the courses materials for a particular person, all together. He didn't seem to find it that amusing, and nor did Kim in the other room (unlike my long chat with the Mormons about prayer, setting my arm on fire, and alien death rays last year), but I thought it was funny anyway.
So, I tore into the M337 box, checked the contents off against the checklist, and again there was no timetable. Not that it matters so much with this course (if you cant work out the order from unit A1 to D3, the subject of complex analysis might be a little beyond you), but I still want to put it up on the wall, and start thinking about a program of study.
I flicked through the M337 books, almost immediately drawn (as most people that know me, wouldn't be surprised to find) to the chapter on the Mandelbrot set. Damn, I have to wait until the end of the course basically to get to that. Oh well. As for the rest of it, well first impressions are that it looks bloody hard! Looking back though, I probably thought the same with M208, and I even recall an acute sense of fear, when I first glanced at the MS221 handbook at the listed of all the symbols and notation I was expected to be familiar with by the end of the course. I expect it's always pretty scary at first. So I'm not that worried, just do the work and it should be fine.
Unfortunately, it's looking like I'll actually have to make the effort and 'learn' the epsilon-delta definition of continuity after all. I totally fudged my way through that last year, and hoped that any question on it would be relegated to an optional one in Part 2 of the exam (which it was)!
Which reminds me, when I looked at the statistics for the M208 exam, I thought it was rather strange to see that 185 people opted to take that question, Q17, making it the second most popular choice for Part 2 (if you ignore the total piece of cake that was Q13 on Groups, that understandably, roughly 4/5 of all students took). Yet it has easily the highest rate of people getting just 0-14%, as many as 19% of them, the next worst was way down at 11%.
An unscientific overview of all the scores here suggested that only Q14 resulted in overall worse results. Why'd they all choose it then? Maybe they thought they couldn't go wrong with graph sketching, who knows. As for me, well, I saw that epsilon delta question and instantly kept my distance. (For the record I took Q13 (it was effectively free points afterall), and Q15 on convergence and least upper bounds, which was pretty straightforward).
No comments:
Post a Comment