M303 Further Pure Mathematics

I completed this course in 2016 and achieved a grade 2 pass. It's a very tough course, in my opinion. You should have completed M208 (or its equivalent) recently prior to starting M303 in order to be properly prepared. Tutor support is excellent, but the textbooks don't do much to make the material accessible and sometimes they seem to make it deliberately obscure. Since you will spend most of your time slogging through the textbooks, this is unfortunate. The workload is relentless. I had no time for anything else and had to put the rest of my life on hold until the course was over. Preparing for the exam is difficult because of the lack of past papers. The online quizzes are good, but don't simulate exam conditions well. With hindsight I should have left more time for doing practice papers under exam conditions. However, having completed the course I'm glad I stuck it out. Think of it as climbing a mountain: painful at the time but earning a lifelong sense of achievement. Looking back, I feel I've gained something valuable which is partly a kind of mathematical maturity, and partly a kind of humility.

I did the course and sat the exam in 2015, on its first presentation, and got a distinction, which surprised me, as the exam was very time-pressured, and some of the TMAs were challenging, to say the least. However, I think it is a brilliant course and took me to a new level of dealing with stuff you find nearly overwhelming, but, trusting your instincts and, having found a way through the fog, you also find you somehow emerge, miraculously, at the other side with a new awareness. It was all very interesting, and perhaps an introduction to working at a more advanced level. There were lots of errors in the original textbooks, but I think the OU will have rectified them. I completely recommend it if you are serious about advancing your ambitions in maths and, although I have to say it nearly killed me, as I have a massively full-on job, and was also caring for my elderly dad, i wouldn't have missed it. The stuff on Rings and Fields is amazing, as the topology, and cryptography. A lot of the material is really current and cutting-edge. God bless the OU for making the effort to create something at this level which you can do at home.