Results Day

Our Facebook group was bubbling. It had become the place to go as the forums shut down one week after the EMA deadline. Rumours flew that our results would come out at eleven. ‘REFRESH REFRESH REFRESH!’ someone typed. For me, this was the Monday I spend in planning meetings. By eleven I was leading a retrospective. The team broke up for a while and I checked—nothing going on but simmering impatience. One student was about to give up and go shopping for a Christmas tree. At work, our planning continued. We stopped for another break and then I saw that a minute earlier, somebody had noticed changes on the OU website. The status of her Masters had gone from ‘In Progress’ to ‘Completed’. Everyone rushed from Facebook to the OU. My result was in: a Distinction for the EMA, with a Merit for the module as a whole. Such a relief. Earlier I’d started to think I might fail entirely. Then how would I have got through all those meetings? After all, my EMA was political—not everybody’s cup of tea.

People were celebrating. Students posted to the Facebook group who’d never been seen before. A couple had Distinctions. A few were disappointed, stung by results that were still passes. Only one had failed as she hadn’t been able to submit a full collection of stories. Life gets in the way sometimes.

The planning meeting rolled on. During a half hour break for lunch, I thought more about the result. After a successful first year, there’d been something rotten about the second. The first assignment had been catastrophic and the others floundered below the line of a distinction. Now, with a different examiner, I’d jumped back over that line.

Maybe it was the commentaries. It’s hard to tell because the marking was opaque, but it might have been that if you don’t mention your past work in the commentaries, you lose out. In my case I didn’t have much in the way of past work. Perhaps good advice for people planning to take a Masters in Creative writing is to build up a portfolio of work first, both to develop your skills and as something to refer to later.

On the OU website, the Masters was still marked as ‘In Progress’ for me. I ‘hadn’t yet gained enough points to be eligible for a qualification’. Once our planning was over, I phoned the OU. A nice chap called Ben answered. I’d got all the points for a Masters, he said, but it might take up to 48 hours for the site to update. I knew the status had changed hours ago for some people, but nobody had got an email yet. Mine finally arrived at half seven, telling me the results were in. The Masters is still ‘In Progress’.

It’s late in the evening now, and people are still checking into the Facebook group with their results. Someone is suggesting a real-life meet up. Soon we’ll all need to decide where we’re taking this. What do you do with a Masters in Creative Writing?