Calculate your Open University Law Degree classification

Some­time ago I pos­ted a link to another blog con­tain­ing a link to a degree clas­si­fic­a­tion cal­cu­lator for Open Uni­ver­sity degrees. How­ever, the way the clas­si­fic­a­tion is cal­cu­lated for OU law degrees is slightly dif­fer­ent. Luck­ily, it’s pretty simple to work out.

The OU law degree con­sists of 4 man­dat­ory courses: W200, W201, W300 and W301. For W200 and W201, mul­tiply your grade (1–4) for each course by 60. For W300 and W301, mul­tiply it by 120 (to reflect the degree of sig­ni­fic­ance for these courses). Take those four num­bers and add them together. Their sum will give your class of degree:

• 630 or fewer — First class honours
• 631–900 — Upper second class honours
• 901‑1170 — Lower second class honours
• 1171 or more — Third class honours

There is one trick to this. If you have a poor res­ult in either W200 or W201, you can replace half of it with a bet­ter res­ult in one of the law short courses: W221, W222, W223 or W224. For example:

Grade 3 pass of W200: 3 × 60 = 180 points.
Grade 3 pass of W200 and a Grade 1 pass of W223: 3 × 30 plus 1 × 30 = 120 points

That can be enough to pull you up a grade!

Just for com­plete­ness — while you need to sit 360 points’ worth of courses, it is (with the excep­tion noted above) only the 240 points of the man­dat­ory law courses that count to your law degree classification.

Source: (and a really use­ful read for all OU law stu­dents) Choos­ing your path to an Open Uni­ver­sity Law degree: a guide