Project management exam - results

I received this afternoon an email from Heriot Watt University informing me that the results of the exams held in December are now available. In a flash, I fired up Firefox and clicked on the shortcut which would take me to the exam results page. The result for Project Management was ... 78! This is my second highest score (not unexpectedly, the top score was in accounting) and is higher than I had expected. 

A new wrinkle is that there is a breakdown of marks per question. The first question, organisational behaviour chart, awarded me only 14 marks out of 25; as I had a feeling that I had misunderstood one part of the question, this doesn't come as too much of a surprise. The second question, CPM, awarded me 22 out of 25, and the third question, EVA, gave me 24 out of 25. That leaves 18 out of 25 for the last question, which was an essay about risk (explain the difference between risk and uncertainty); this mark is certainly higher than I expected.

Pleased? Over the moon!

May I remind my readers that this is a British mark; 65-80 is considered an A (very good) and 80+ is X (excellent). Converting these marks into Israeli figures would mean that the 78 is probably around 92. Now of course, I'm disappointed that I didn't get a few more marks in the OBS question, which would have raised my mark into the X band. This reminds me of a story my parents used to tell of a wonder child whose school report showed that he had a mark of 99 out of 100; his teacher's comment was "could do better".

Lest one think that all is wonderful in MBA land, today I completed another exercise in my marketing course. Although the skeleton of the exercise is the same as the other exercises which I have done, the product in this exercise is completely different to the previous exercises and needs different answers. I scanned my handwritten, five page, answer and sent the resulting pdf file to the lecturer. Within about fifteen minutes, I got a reply back, listing four or five issues which need correcting. Of course, one learns more from one's mistakes than from other sources.

Adding corrections to a hand written script probably means that I will have to write the whole thing out again. It's a chore but there are advantages to doing so.