Results Unit one

Yesterday, I received my results for the first unit and currently, it is 3am and I have been watching Instagram videos for the last 2 hours and I can’t sleep, so I thought I would write a post summing up my thoughts and feelings.

Firstly, I am glad that I didn’t know when the results were going to be posted, otherwise I would have been up for the last week, not being able to sleep worrying about them. As it was, I only had about 5 minutes, where I thought my heart was going to give up the ghost.

So there were 4 parts to unit 1. The practical work, a working diary, a verbal talk about the practical and finally an essay between 2000-3000 words. These were then placed into 2 categories. Innovative practice and contemporary debates and creative enquiry, with me getting a mark for each category.

The marking system in the UK is broken down to Distinction (over 70%), Merit (60-69%) and pass (50-59%). Coming into university, I thought that I would do well on the practical elements of the course and be a bit of a disaster at the written side, barely scraping by. I had barely scraped getting a 2/2 in my degree, mainly due to my writing, which wasn’t very good, with my dissertation being a complete disaster. But over the last 20 years, I had looked at my mistakes and the mistakes of others when completing the course, so coming back to university I had an idea, of how i could improve.

Fortunately, for all the issues I have with the course, I do have to compliment my lecturers on the advise they gave on writing. Feeling like I was able to go and talk to them, made a big difference and having someone go through what an essay could look like and how to do think about writing made a massive difference.

For Innovative practice, I received a 68%. This was the area, I thought I would do well in. I had hoped to get over 70%, so I was a tiny bit disappointed with the result but I probably shouldn’t be, with everything that had happened over the previous months. I do think I put a decent body of work together and I did try various things, which I hadn’t tried before and there is a lot I can take forward to Unit 2, which is the main element of the MA.

In regards to contemporary debates and creative enquiry, I am quite ecstatic. I was expecting no more than 55% and that was my wieldiest dreams result. I got 66%, which I really couldn’t believe and I had to go back to double check, because I thought I was a mistake.

The two main areas of contemporary debates and creative enquiry were the diary and essay. I wasn’t massively happy with my working diary, I just felt it wasn’t quite up to the level I wanted in terms of detail and polish but I don’t think it was bad. In regards to the essay, I did massively better than I had expected and whilst the lecturer would have liked me to cover slightly less area and be more detailed, with the essay, he did say he thought it was a good essay.

So moving forward to Unit 2, I am a month into preparation and things are moving very fast. I have done a couple of photoshoots to keep in practice and am working on my final practical work, as well as nailing down my 4000-5000 research paper, which is a little different to an essay.

But more on that in the future.