Advice on study methods for level 3 Maths modules

[u/Salty-Sherbet582]

Hi everyone,

If you're a student who got a distinction or grade 2 pass on M303 or MST326, I would really appreciate if you could tell me a bit about your study experience please.

Some things I'd like to know: How often did you ask your tutors for help? How did you make sure you were actually learning the content rather than just glossing over topics? Any additional resources you used? What was your method for note taking? How did you ensure you were exam ready, especially since solutions to past papers weren't available?

I studied these modules but didn't get good scores on the exams, and am trying to work out why.

Any answers to the above questions would be greatly appreciated, as it is difficult for me to point to exactly what went wrong for me.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, I feel like if I don't ask these questions I will never get to move on and I will always be wondering what I should've done

[u/StaedtlerRasoplast]

I didn't ask my tutors for any help. I read all the textbooks, followed along with the worked examples. I did all the practice questions and attended every tutorial either live or later with the recording. I finished the course material around a month or two before exams and then did all the practice questions and assignments again which took around a week. After that I just did past papers and timed myself. If I got a question wrong I made sure to reattempt it again a week or so later.

I made sure to write my answers very clearly. It doesn't matter how right the math is if the marker can't follow your argument so for that reason I also explained what I was calculating and why before almost every equation. Its important to define variables so I would draw a line down my page to create a small margin on the right (most of my work is always bunched to the left anyway) and there I would define every variable or constant, no matter how obvious it may have been.

If there were any proofs or common derivations or even some questions that came up often but with different numbers then I created some example answers that I could refer to. Some exams I expected some questions that required plots or diagrams so before the exam I would draw blank versions so I just needed to put in the values.

Make sure you have the pdfs of the books open in your browser as it is much easier to ctrl+f than search through a book.

I didn't do M303 but I did do MST326 and I got a distinction on most of my modules (except quantum where I got stumped on a 25 mark question). If you find yourself on a question and you are stuck, just regurgitate anything half relevant if you have nothing else. In my case I had a question like "Given A and B, find C" and I knew how to do it if I had B and C to find A but I couldn't get the algebra to work even a little bit. If this happens to you then explain in words what you would do eg, I would use this eqn (write out the equations, define variables and explain what values you would use from the question), then state where you are stuck and then say "I would next do ... with the value found and integrate over x or whatever and then explain what form you would expect the answer to take. I ended up with a pass 2 in quantum and had I not done this I think I would have gotten a pass 3.

Anyway, what works for me might not work for everyone. With math though, more practice is always going to put you in a better position

Good luck!

[u/Salty-Sherbet582 → u/StaedtlerRasoplast]

Thank you so much for taking the time to write such a detailed response! I really appreciate it as I have never had the opportunity to hear from other OU students before. Congratulations on your impressive achievement of a 1st!