The marking is generally bell curved according to that lecturer's class. They will skew it in away to try and reflect a bell curve as much as possible. For my Public law class, my lecturer gave me a raw mark of 72, however, it was one of the higher raw marks out of all her students and so she adjusted it to 75. I don't think it's too hard to get Ds for law. For my contracts assignment last year, only about 4/80 students received HDs however, about 20-30 received D and another 20-30 received credits.1. Marking: After looking at course outlines, I noticed UNSW has a MUCH heavier focus on class participation and group assignments. Further i have heard that all law finals are open book. How does this generally impact on grades and scaling? Is it difficult to get ds or hds? As a commerce student, it was a pretty straight forward process of getting hds or ds...
Usyd on the other hand puts alot more focus on the individual and alot of the finals are like 80% of the grade and there are no group assignments. I did hear that HDs were capped and are pretty much unheard from a law student at Usyd open day.
I haven't applied for exchange but I know someone who went on exchange to UCL for a year with a law wam of 65-70. His overall WAM though is about 75-80.2. Exchange opportunities: Usyd has some fantastic US exchange partners such as Cornell, NYU and Emory however i believe last year only one place was offered for each of these universities. UNSW less variety in US partners but has good European partners. Adding to the fact of the extremely high-achieving cohort, what would be considered a competitive wam to get a place an exchange place?
Regarding Electives, the UNSW Law Soc publishes an elective guide every year. It will contain student's opinion of the course and what the course is about. Here is a copy of 2011 Electives. http://unswlawsoc.org/publications/electives_2011.pdf
Here is also a list of electives from the UNSW Law Website for JDs http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/courses/jd/5
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