Sunday 5 December 2010

Well I had been hoping to have results for both my assignments in English and German by now but alas I do not. I am happy to report that I did exceptionally well with my German and got 97%, although when converted into final marks it sounds a lot less impressive as it was only worth a max 5% of the continuous assessment mark, which in turn is only 2.5% of my overall score.  Anyway if I get stranded at an airport or need to spell my name or give my telephone number out I am golden apparently...

English is a rather irritating story.  I had hopes that because we had a tutorial yesterday morning that like last time the results might materialise some time on Friday.  They did not.  When asked our tutor said that he had marked them and it must be a computer glitch that we hadn't got them, benefit of the doubt things like that can go wrong. However shortly afterwards he said that the cut off was 24th November and that he'd sent them off about 10 days afterwards which was around Monday... hang on... but yesterday was the 10 day mark.  Okay so he's an English teacher not a Maths teacher, number of days might escape him.  So can he give us our marks individually? Nope they have to go via the system, he isn't allowed to discuss our own marks with us on a one to one basis... erm... oookay.  Lastly, we did have a small discussion at break between us students about the last TMA and the fact we all posted so we could read each others, and bearing in mind this guy is quite passionate about linguistics he didn't mention anything about any of our postings, such as variety, interest etc.  So conclusion? I must admit to thinking he hasn't looked at our assignments yet, let alone marked them.  Oh well the OU says that we should expect to get results back up to two weeks after submission, hopefully I'll have them before Wednesday.

Apart from the non marked assignments the tutorial was pretty useful with regards to the assignment due in January, I just need to find a program to transcribe.  I was thinking of Jeremy Kyle because it is at least linguistically interesting but he's gone and changed the format of his show, they've given him a desk and everything now! I will need to have it transcribed by the time I go to Germany or find a suitable clip I can access while I am over there, otherwise it might put a spanner in the works.

Sorry for the somewhat boring post... seems I needed a rant!

2 comments:

  1. No apology required: it's good to get it all out of your system! Very easy to get frustrated with things taking a long time as well, can't blame you. I've found there are such total extremes of efficiency with the OU - it takes one guy two weeks to mark your paper, and yet within a week of me sending my application for my next course they've signed me up and sent me all my books... for a course that starts in February. And I haven't even paid for it yet.

    Congratulations on your 97 gold stars! :)

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  2. Thank Frau Dietz, I agree with you about the extremes of efficiency, admin side they are usually very good, although I do have to laugh that I live about 10 minutes away from the Open University and yet my course materials always show up at about 7:30pm, whereas a friend in Liverpool will get hers before noon!

    A lot of the experience depends on the tutor, new tutors usually have a much higher motivation to be more involved with their students. One of the other tutors of the English course, for example, has week by week worksheets for her tutor group, she is active within their forum and will get assignments marked extraordinarily promptly. My tutor will generally not visit our forum and last tutorial he hadn't even looked at the course materials outside the textbooks. However he did finally get the assignments marked and I almost choked on my tea when I saw my result, for the first assignment I had scored 69% and was hoping to beat it... this time I got 93%!! I am not sure I will be able to beat that next time, but I'll certainly be aiming for the 80's. It also means I am only full of love for said tutor right now :D

    Are you excited about your next course? I love the arrival of new books!

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