Coursework 1 - General Feedback

Week 1 - this question was done quite well and most students obtained full marks. There was 1 mark each for parts (a) and (b) for stating that these are not linear programmes and 4 marks for (c) for transforming the linear programme into standard inequality form. 

Week 2 - Part (a) was done reasonably well with around 75% of students obtaining close to the full 5 marks. Part (b) was more difficult as it was not directly comparable to any examples from lectures or the seminars. Around 30% of students got this fully correct obtaining the full 2 marks.  A few more got this partially correct (missing out e.g. the fact that we need c to be at least 0 in the solution). Note that for both parts, there is more than one correct answer.

Week 3 - Part (a) was worth 4 marks. Many students got the sketch correct, but incorrectly concluded that the linear programme was unbounded and so obtained 2/4 marks. Part (b) was worth 3 marks. It was done better with many students finding the correct optimal solution and obtaining full marks. [In this question there were no marks for explaining your method for finding the optimal solution, but in an exam there might be, so make sure you can explain how you arrive at the solution. An incomplete understanding of the method is probably the reason why part (a) was done poorly.]