This petition has the aim of highlighting the failures in the delivery of the Stochastic Processes module and the severity of those failures.

The first issue with the module was the lectures. It goes without saying that Dr Dario Spanò is obviously a brilliant mathematician. However, near enough every one of his lectures had numerous mistakes. While I understand that everyone makes arithmetic errors, numerous errors in the vast majority of lectures starts to affect the confidence and concentration of the students sat in front of him.

These mistakes became more of a problem when they fed through to the support classes. There were a few examples where the seminar supervisor found the solutions difficult to understand and had to create their own or didn’t understand the solution at all and we were left without an answer. This was brought up to Dario at the time and the solutions were removed from the web page to be reviewed, they have not been uploaded since.

Which brings me onto the biggest issue, the resources. There is a webpage for the lecture notes of this academic year. The last time these notes were updates was January 26th, only 17 days into the module, they contain about a week’s worth of content. Instead of finishing a complete set of lecture notes, we have a document pointing us towards 2 different sets of lecture notes and one textbook. Obviously, these do not flow at all, they use differing notation and lack good quality explanations.

All of these problems come together and result in a mess of a module. The teaching was substandard but the real problem comes when you try to learn the module in your own time. It feels like we are being set up for failure. And with 70% of ST202 students last year failing to achieve a 2:1, I fear the same might happen again and it if it does it will be because of the reasons above. Furthermore, the failures in this module will have an impact on students’ abilities to choose modules for the following year as ST202 is a prerequisite for ST333.

I appreciate that it is too late to change anything about the module, but we ask for these points to be considered when allocating grades because it is unfair for everyone’s degrees to suffer because of it.

PLEASE ADD YOUR STUDENT ID ONTO THE END OF YOUR NAME WHEN SIGNING. Thanks