UNSW Subject Reviews. (1 Viewer)

f111c

New Member
Joined
Nov 25, 2014
Messages
11
Gender
Male
HSC
2017
Hi Guys,

I’ve done the following subjects at UTS (done 6 subjects, only 5 can count).

Accounting A 98
Accounting B (DN)
Fundamentals of Business Finance 89
Business Stats (Pass)
Economics (DN)

What are some good subjects everyone can suggest, for the first and second year?
 

Mitsunami

Member
Joined
Dec 7, 2012
Messages
52
Gender
Male
HSC
2013
Anyone with thoughts on these subjects?

- MANF6860 Strategic Manufacturing Management
- MANF4430 Reliability and Maintenance Engineering

Planning on doing one of these as an elective from what's available next term.
 

Squar3root

realest nigga
Joined
Jun 10, 2012
Messages
4,985
Location
phenchod
Gender
Male
HSC
1998
Uni Grad
2005
Anyone with thoughts on these subjects?

- MANF6860 Strategic Manufacturing Management
- MANF4430 Reliability and Maintenance Engineering

Planning on doing one of these as an elective from what's available next term.
i haven't done these subjects personally, but from what I've heard, 6860 is a pretty good course, sami teaches it well. reliability with erik is a bit more full on with work
 

Mitsunami

Member
Joined
Dec 7, 2012
Messages
52
Gender
Male
HSC
2013
i haven't done these subjects personally, but from what I've heard, 6860 is a pretty good course, sami teaches it well. reliability with erik is a bit more full on with work
Appreciate it Squar3. Was already leaning towards 6860 so this is a nice confirmation.
 

qanguyenxuan

New Member
Joined
May 25, 2019
Messages
3
Gender
Male
HSC
2017
Commerce Core Courses: (Did all this in Sem 1 2018)

ACCT1501 Accounting and Financial Management 1A
Ease 9/10: This is a fairly easy course if you understand the content (esp. journal entries) and tutorial stuff and practice some past papers. Final was alright. Easy D/HD
Content 7/10: Nothing too interesting, but I kinda liked it. Good foundation course
Lectures (Youngdeok) 7/10: If you can get past his accent, his lecture is pretty decent. He explains the stuff ok and even gets us
engaged with the occasional Kahoot.
Tutorials (Gavin) 8/10: He does a good job getting students engaged.

Overall: 8/10 - not hard and a good introductory course for accounting students

ECON1101 Microeconomics 1
Ease 9/10: The mid-sem quizzes are not hard, but you gotta present/explain your answer in a clear way that the tutor is happy with. Otherwise, the course is really easy. Free marks from Playconomics. Finals was all MCQ and nothing too difficult.
Content 9/10: Actually found the content kinda interesting and not difficult to grasp
Lectures (Jonathan) 8/10: He explained all the content clearly. Lecture slides were simple and concise. Kinda wish I went to Alberto's instead for the entertainment...
Tutorials (Edward) 8/10: Went through some of the tutorial questions quite well

Overall: 9/10 - another easy D/HD, course is very well run

ECON1203 Business and Economic Statistics
Ease 8/10: The Excel project is a bit of a pain, but overall the course is fine. MyStatLab quizzes were also a bit painful but not too bad. Final was fine.
Content 8/10: Content was pretty good, mostly distribution, probability, hypothesis tests and regression
Lectures 2/10: Didn't really get anything out of this.
Tutorials (Lee Lee) 8/10: Her tutorials were quite helpful and she always makes some funny jokes. She does go through questions a bit too quickly though and she marks the Excel project hard.
PASS Class 10/10: SOOOO HELPFUL, especially from normal distributions onwards

Overall: 8/10 - should be fine. Just go to PASS class and understand the tutorial stuff

MGMT1001 Managing Organisations and People
Ease 7/10 - The essay assignments were difficult, but the rest is pretty easy. Free 12% from the ACT exercises. The video's easy as long as you have a good group. The exam was fine. For the short essays questions, they actually announced which topics were tested there, and even let us choose 2 out of 4 questions to do.
Content 3/10: Boring
Lectures (Katherine, Hugh, Markus) 5/10: Not too bad. A decent job summarising the content. It's no surprise though that the lecture room was nearly empty near the end of semester.
Tutorials (Terry) 5/10: Wasn't his fault. He was actually pretty good. Just the tutorials were a bit useless overall.


Overall: 5/10 - pointless subject unless you're majoring in mgmt. The Everest activities were actually interesting. People call this a WAM killer, but my cohort did pretty good. It wasn't that hard if you can get past the essays.
 

qanguyenxuan

New Member
Joined
May 25, 2019
Messages
3
Gender
Male
HSC
2017
Sem 2 2018 (didn't go lectures for any):

ACCT1511 Accounting & Financial Management 1B
Ease 8/10: Found parts of it hard, but it gets better with practice. Team quizzes were ok but I hated that you had to do them in order. Individual quizzes were easy. Just put in the work with the tute questions and you'll be fine. Do some past papers to prep for finals
Content 7/10: Not too interesting, but a good extension off 1A
Tutorials (forgot tutor's name) 9/10: She explained everything really well and was willing to help. It was good that we got to interact in groups during tutorials (although we were all randomly allocated into permanent groups for the whole semester)

Overall: 8/10

ECON1102 Macroeconomics 1
Ease 8/10: Found this harder than Micro 1, but still ok. All MCQ. In-class assignments were easy, just talk it over with your classmates. PlayMacro questions are easy marks, just a chore to get through. I think those who did Eco in HSC will find this course easy.
Content 8/10: good introduction to stuff like income-expenditure, fiscal and monetary policies, AD-AS and the labour market. A bit dry but still somewhat interesting
Tutorials (Edward) 8/10: he's a good tutor who explains the stuff well (coincidentally the same tutor from micro 1). Fairly lenient on marking tutorial assignments

Overall: 8/10

TABL1710 Business and the Law
Ease 7/10: I'm not a strong essay guy, but the content isn't too hard if you have studied the textbook well and memorised some cases, which would really help you get through the essays and the final.
Content 6/10: Actually a decent introduction to law and how it applies in business
Seminars (Paddy Hennigan, forgot the other guy's name) 9/10: very engaging group discussions. Example scenarios shown were hilarious (some meme-worthy) and did help quite a bit with the content.

Overall: 7/10

ECON1202 Quantitative Analysis for Business and Economics
Ease 8/10: Overall if you're solid at maths, then you'll find this course to be a breeze. But don't neglect studying the multivariable calculus and Lagrangian content. I was underprepared for that and it cost me an easy distinction in the final. Tutorial quizzes were ok, with some confusing questions.
Content 8/10
Tutorials (Bora) 7/10: He was ok, but his classes felt like such a slow pace. Was very lenient giving out CP. I got 5/5, despite answering 1-2 questions in class the entire semester

Overall 8/10
 

qanguyenxuan

New Member
Joined
May 25, 2019
Messages
3
Gender
Male
HSC
2017
T1 2019:

FINS1612 Capital Markets and Institutions
Ease 7/10: Mostly memorising, with a bit of calculations here and there. Quiz 2 is hard though (normally a pass/low credit avg). iLab assignment was fine. Finals was too - majority of the MCQ were straight out of past papers
Content 6/10: Kinda boring, nothing too interesting
Tutorials (Yan Su) 8/10: Went through at least half of the tutorial questions and explained the content fairly well
Lectures: Don't know. Only went there for the 2 quizzes

Overall: 7/10

FINS1613 Business Finance
Ease 6/10: Most of the content itself isn't so hard to get your head around. Quiz 1 was super easy. Quiz 2 was super hard (78% fail rate, so they had to scale up by 22.5%). Quiz 3 wasn't so bad but only a pass avg. Finals was difficult too. This is a course you can't just BS through if you want to do well. Make good use of the practice and past papers they post on Moodle. However, it shouldn't be so hard to at least pass.
Content 7/10
Tutorials (Susan) 9/10: Her slides were structured very well, integrating some of the MFL questions with the content in an order that made sense.

Overall 7/10: To get a good mark, you should try to understand the content first, then do the MFL HW (easy marks), then read through Susan's slides (she normally emails them at the end of each week), and finally practice some past paper questions. Overall, the tutors are willing to give you some guidance (without actually giving it away) on the forums if you need help with content/questions.


ECON2101 Microeconomics 2
Ease 2/10: I've heard in the past it wasn't so bad, but it looks like with the changes they've made, it is actually ridiculously painful. Overall, the content is difficult apart from like 2-3 topics. They won't post past papers or HW solutions on Moodle, so try to come to every tutorial. Ultimately, the final (worth 60%) only tests 3 or 4 topics randomly selected (I'd expect one of them to be the last topic) and it was the worst test I've ever done. A lot of students in the exam room were freaking out after the test. Good thing they decided to scale it.
Content 3/10
Tutorials (Jack Buckley) 7/10: He did his best with what he had. Pretty lenient on CP (most likely a group presentation). Went through all the HW questions (and some of the optional ones too).

Overall: 4/10 - Unless you're an eco student, AVOID THIS ONE AT ALL COSTS!!!
 

Opengangs

New Member
Joined
Dec 6, 2018
Messages
19
Location
North Shore, Sydney
Gender
Male
HSC
2017
19T2 courses:
COMP1521 - Computer System Fundamentals
- Ease: 7/10. Programming is divided into two different languages. You dabble with assembly language (in this course, you are introduced to MIPS and you use QtSPIM to debug the code), and you also do a fair bit of C programming. In contrast to COMP1511, COMP1521 focuses more on the theory of the course.
- Content: 6/10. Wasn't really anything interesting tbh, just a lot of theory squashed in a space of 10 weeks.
- Tutorials: 7/10.

Overall: 6/10.

MATH2221 - Higher Theory and Applications of Differential Equations
- Ease: 7/10. A lot of what you do in this course goes back to MATH1231/1241 material where you first learn about first and second order ODEs. A lot of the higher materials will be an additional tool in your toolbox.
- Content: 6/10. Meh... nothing too interesting about the course content. Basically a lot of differential equations, and it is your goal to develop the best strategy to tackling these equations.
- Tutorials: 5/10. Same old, same old.

Overall: 6/10. Not as interesting as MATH2601, but interesting enough nevertheless.

MATH2601 - Higher Linear Algebra
- Ease: 4/10. As with all of the other higher mathematics courses, MATH2601 is heavy on the theoretical aspects. You begin to do a lot more proofs related to linear algebra, and the lecturers are picky with how notation is used.
- Content: 8/10. Loved the content; it was really interesting and it is a course that is really important for level 3+ courses.
- Tutorials: 9/10. Would rather have flipped classroom tutorials because it gives you a chance to learn from your mistakes.

Overall: 7/10.
 

Fr0g

New Member
Joined
Feb 9, 2016
Messages
1
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
N/A
How hard is comp1521 for someone who has only done comp1511 and has no other coding background?
 

spaghettii

Active Member
Joined
Jul 2, 2017
Messages
241
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
2018
Uni Grad
2021
^ would also like to know, as well as 2521

Any recent reviews for 2521?
 

fan96

617 pages
Joined
May 25, 2017
Messages
543
Location
NSW
Gender
Male
HSC
2018
Uni Grad
2024
How hard is comp1521 for someone who has only done comp1511 and has no other coding background?
1521 focuses a lot on how computers actually work, on a low level scale.
If you aren't experienced with computers in general, it will probably be a bit challenging, but it shouldn't be too hard.

^ would also like to know, as well as 2521

Any recent reviews for 2521?
2521 is fairly simple. It starts out by filling a bunch of holes that 1511 left open, and the content after that is fairly easy to get the hang of. The labs are short and the midsem is very easy. The assignments are large, however.

Ashesh is a good lecturer, but he's very slow. It'll be more time-efficient to watch lecture recordings at 1.7x speed (or higher).
 

fan96

617 pages
Joined
May 25, 2017
Messages
543
Location
NSW
Gender
Male
HSC
2018
Uni Grad
2024
COMP2521 - Data Structures and Algorithms
Ease: 8/10. (kind of).
Conceptually some of the content gets very tricky to properly understand, but in terms of assessment you won't actually need to be that familiar with them. Midsem is really really easy. Assignments are fairly large.

Content: 7/10.
Most of the algorithms and data structures are very interesting. A few boring parts, but nothing snoozeworthy.

Lectures: 6/10.
Ashesh does a good job explaining the content but he's painfully slow.

Tutorials: 4/10.
My tutor did a great job at explaining the content, but this course has a severe understaffing problem.
On average I waited 40 minutes to an hour just to get a lab marked off. Assignment marks came out after exams.

MATH1081 - Discrete Mathematics
Ease: 7/10.
Nothing too wacky in the content, though at times it can be a bit confusing. Assignment is really easy. The lab tests are manageable.

Content: 2/10.
Most of the stuff in the course is either really easy (HSC revision) or really boring. Without a higher MATH1091 to complement it, this course really suffers because it's catered to compsci students who just want to get it over with, and there's little to no acknowledgement of the people doing this course just for the math.
Interesting results and their proofs (e.g. solving recurrence relations, non-real solutions of recurrence relations, powers of adjacency matrices in graph theory) are skipped because "you don't need to know this for the final".
The lecturers are unnecessarily pedantic about how you do certain proofs and not in the good way (e.g. quoting everything verbatim).
There are way too many overly tedious calculations in the divisibility, modular arithmetic and combinatorics topics.

Lectures: 9/10.
Daniel Mansfield is a great lecturer as long as he doesn't spend too much time talking about ancient Babylonian arithmetic.
Frances Kuo is also great.

Tutorials: 7/10*.
Again, this is where the course suffers most from not having a Higher variant. If you're good with maths you're going to be bored out of your mind, because the tutor will spend all of the class time doing the really easy questions, and there won't be any time left for the interesting challenge questions (and there are some really good ones too). I used the tutorial time to just do other coursework - might as well not have gone at all.
(*) But the tutors are good, and the tutorials are done well so I'm giving this a 7.

MATH2701 - Abstract Algebra and Fundamental Analysis
Ease: 5/10.
Very challenging, but for all the right reasons. At times it gets very abstract and very hard to visualise. There are quizzes, take-home tests, several assignments (four overall) and the questions get pretty difficult. The final is really hard but it does get scaled to compensate.
(Something I found annoying was that all assessment submissions were hard copy only, but you do get the results back very fast because the cohort is so small.)

Content: 10/10.
The course is a mix of interesting topics and (some) really nice proofs. There are so many mind-blowing moments throughout (though not all of them are explicitly mentioned). It's amazing and there's never been a moment where I found myself bored of the content.

The only possible criticisms I can think of are that some of the proofs are a bit odd or messy (maybe a better one at this level hasn't been found yet), and the analysis half cut out the prime numbers topic and a few other things due to time constraints of trimesters, which is disappointing.

Lectures: 7/10.
The algebra lecturer is very good. Great delivery and knows his stuff.
The analysis lecturer is good at teaching, but tends to stutter a bit and kind of just reads off the notes sometimes.

Tutorials: 9/10.
Very small classes are great for learning. As a bonus, the tutors are the lecturers and there's plenty of time to get an explanation if you don't understand something. Tutorial questions are very interesting and thought provoking and many of the final exam questions are lifted straight from the tutorials.
 

Opengangs

New Member
Joined
Dec 6, 2018
Messages
19
Location
North Shore, Sydney
Gender
Male
HSC
2017
20T1 course (yeah, I only did one course this term hehe):
COMP3411 - Artificial Intelligence
For anyone who's thinking of specialising in Artificial Intelligence, this course is a core course and introduces you to the main concepts that will be expanded upon in later courses (such as COMP4418, COMP9417, COMP9517 and COMP9444). However, this course is only a pre-requisite for COMP4418 so it's not required to undertake the other courses aforementioned. The course requires completion of COMP2521 or COMP9024, both of which are Data Structures and Algorithms.

Ease: 8/10.
The course is structured in a way that briefly touches on the main ideas within AI. So while there is no shortage of content, this course lacks depth. Each topic is taught for a week before the lecturer moves on to the next concept. However, the course content itself is manageable.

Content: 6/10.
The content itself is interesting. It's basically your first touch on what studying Artificial Intelligence will be like. The programming taught in the course was on Prolog, which is very different to programming in C, Java or Python, and it may take a few weeks until you understand how to program in this language. Overall, the content was great!

Tutorial: 8/10.
Honestly, I skipped half of my tutorials ever since COVID-19 hit but the tutorials that I did go to pre-lockdown were great. Tutor was chill and it was a good time.

Personally, I enjoyed the course but I can understand why some people felt it was dry and boring. The lack of depth was really the biggest downside, and sometimes it makes learning challenging as once you begin to understand a particular concept, the lecturer moves onto the next topic. However, reading the lecture slides should suffice with that aspect of the course. Would recommend to people who know they definitely want to pursue an Artificial Intelligence specialisation. If you're thinking about this course as a Computer Science elective, I'd personally say no. There's so many more great computer science courses that this course just doesn't make the cut as a recommendation.
 

Actl_anon

New Member
Joined
Apr 28, 2023
Messages
1
Gender
Undisclosed
HSC
2019
FINS3635 - Options, Futures and Risk Management 2023
Third year elective, moderately easy assignments, pretty poorly managed tbh and is one of the more mathematical finance courses.

Ease: 8/10.
This course is not hard, you just need to learn the formulas and you'll be good.

Content: 6/10.
Content was not particularly interesting, a lot of crossover with FINS3635, went into things like options pricing, estimating volatility, pricing swaps, optimal hedging strategies and that kinda thing. Not many proofs involved, more so just do the questions in the tutorials/textbook. Huge difference between the first half and second half of the course, but that was due to different lecturers, where the latter half was much more disorganised. Powerpoint slides which look like a child made them, poorly formatted excel workbooks, no tutorial questions given ("read the textbook and do da questions"), it was the complete antithesis of what $1,800 dollars should buy you. First half was really well done :) thanks Zonghe.

Lecturer 1: Zonghe
9/10
. Put a lot of effort into making polished and concise slides which summarised the core material beautifully. Provided a well structured and organised midterm exam, really the only downsides was his lack of explanation around the assignment (I get it, it needs to be a real-world scenario and we have to figure out everything blah blah), and an inclusion of a topic which was taken out of the syllabus.

Lecturer 2: MHJ
0/10
. This is my primary motivation for making this post, I want there to be some sort of documentation on the internet about the enigma that is MHJ. Triple PHD, superstar associate professor, my first exposure to him was in an ACCT1501 class, and upon hearing his bizarre fake english accent ranting on for the first time, I was wondering if I was watching a professional satirist filming a mockumentary. For this course, here are some of the highlights of his teachings:
  • Speaks with a posh accent which does not exist (pronounces words like "average" as "aRverage", "Nasdaq" as "NaRsdaRq", and rolls every 'r' like he's a crocodile doing a death roll).
    • This was incredibly distracting throughout his lectures
  • Needlessly makes his sentences fancy instead of emphasising clarity
    • Example: "These coefficients sum up to 1" to "I'll add a constraint since these coefficients tautologically must sum up to 1"
  • For assignment 2, he adds in the exact same topic which was taken out of the syllabus and told no one until the day before it was due. There was literally an announcement about the midterm question being taken out, and somehow, he thought it would be appropriate to include this. Shout out to anyone who figured out we were supposed to use the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein model, and not any drift stuff.
Edit: more additional highlights of his shenanigans
  • He was impossible to reach out to via any form of communication: teams, email, phone, course discussion board. I get that you're busy and that you're on multiple company boards or whatever, but this is your job, and you should fulfil such obligations. He also maintained a YouTube channel side hustle (Finance Mark), which he was daily uploading to during this time, despite never having such time to properly manage our course.
  • He unironically said he hoped we found the course was "positive NPV".
  • He had a self-portrait of himself in the background, which also detracted from his teaching. If you look at his YouTube videos, you'll see what I mean, there's even some elephant humans standing in the painting.
  • He included Excel into the final exam as a very last minute announcement. No precedent for this in any course, we weren't led to believe this would happen, he just said have Excel ready.
  • His prekindergarten level PowerPoint slides which used Calibri font and had terrible formatting.
For actual teaching, he was absolutely useless, nothing more to be said. If you ever have the opportunity to witness him teach. please do, you won't regret it.

Tutorial: N/A.

Personally, I found the course was ok if you're a competent human being who knows maths. As such, this course will not be difficult for you, however, I can see how someone who doesn't really like quantitative stuff might not fair so well with this. It was the mismanagement in the latter half of the course (and hence the final), which I particularly disliked and would be the primary reason why someone would want to avoid doing it.
 
Last edited:

Users Who Are Viewing This Thread (Users: 0, Guests: 1)

Top