Student and tutor module reviews

This is an extremely enjoyable module, I cannot stress that enough.

You work through a very nice book and the OU have written coursenotes for you to read alongside the book. You will meet 'self-assessment questions' and 'problems' for each section. If you really want to enjoy the module I suggest that you attempt all of the 'problems' which are questions from the book and these are generally more difficult and take a lot of thinking about. You should also work through all of the theorem/proofs and make sure you understand them, don't skip over them as you'll miss out on the good parts of the course.

If you find that you don't quite understand a theorem just have a quick look ahead to the self-assessment questions and its likely you will find a question asking you to verify the theorem with a numerical example..,doing this if you're not quite sure really helps!


The best part of the module is without doubt the 'doing' of the tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) and also the 'problems' from the book. After all, its the learning which is most important yet all everyone seems to care about is a raw score from an exam....

So moving onto the exam, it magically pushes a vast amount of material into 6 questions and you are to answer 4. The exam questions are much easier than the TMA questions but I personally think that is a bad thing. The majority of the exam content is predictable (there is only a set amount of questions which are arguably 'exam'able') but sadly it is also littered with tedious congruence problems, something which doesn't really happen in the TMA questions. So you'll be using up a lot of brain power just memorising congruence solving strategies (or not, in my case) from a first year undergraduate course which are not covered in the module.

My advice is do the module I can guarantee you'll enjoy it but you must be prepared to work hard and long hours on the material.

Course starting: October 2019

Review posted: July 2020