On the ‘StudentHome’ portal the OU have quite a good qualification planner that allows you to plan out courses for a degree and predict a classification. I’ve used this in the past and found it useful though the Computing and Design BSc is still so new (I assume) that it isn’t yet available on the qualification planner so I’ve had to work through manually (diddums!)
Anyway, I think I posted before about the route through the degree – in brief: 60 compulsory points at level 1 (the 2 ‘introductory’ computing/IT courses); 90 at level 2 (T211 design plus either Java or Visual Basic); 150 at level 3 (artificial intelligence M366, interaction design M364, innovation and design T307* and computing/IT project course M450*) plus to make it up to 360 points total for the degree, 60 of free choice from any undergraduate courses, with some in psychology/systems/computing being particularly recommended.
From the award regulations, we can count M256 (Software Development with Java) as long as M257 (Putting Java to Work) is also counted, these make up 60 points together thus completing the 60 points of ‘free choice’ with a computing emphasis. I also wanted to include M263 (Building Blocks of Software) as this contains the more abstract components of ‘computer science’ rather than ‘software engineering’: proof in the mathematical sense, logic, time complexity functions, etc. Not sure now what counts as a “specified” course, as the only courses specified as compulsory/optional that I haven’t already included above is Visual Basic (which I’ve not taken and don’t intend to!) seemingly ruling out M263. I’ve also got the Robotics short course (T184) counted towards it at the moment but think this will need to be unlinked.
So using the ‘Working out the class of honours’ document from the Student Policies site, the courses used to classify it will be the 150 points at Level 3 (M450, M366, M364, T307) and the remaining 90 (240 – 150) from the best grades on the others from the prescribed courses. So using the weightings specified T307 actually comes out as having the most influence since it’s not possible to make 60 points of Level 3 distinction any other way (given that M366, M364 each were a Pass 2 and in both cases I thought this was harsh as it was the first presentation and there were numerous confusions over the TMAs though I got over the 85 threshold in their exams, the OU do have some discretion to move grade boundaries but didn’t seem to have used it) so M450 doesn’t matter too much as long as it’s not awful.
Though I think M450 should be given more emphasis somehow (in the various Computing degrees not just this one) since it’s really working on an independent effort and project managing it etc that demonstrates skill and employability, rather than regurgitating course books into TMAs, as the degrees are supposed to be about employability, but oh well.
Strangely U101 (Design Thinking) isn’t specified for this degree, though it is for the BA/BSc hons in Design and Innovation (ie not ‘Computing with…’). It’s a 60 point course though so perhaps wouldn’t allow the Level 1 computing to be included then. I considered the Design and Innovation degree briefly but I think (for me personally at least) the strength is in breadth of area rather than specialisation, so Computing and Design is a much broader and more balanced degree (other than U101, there isn’t any additional “design” but is more in the business, systems and engineering type of courses).
