UNSW Subject Reviews. (1 Viewer)

obliviousninja

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ACCT2542
Ease: BS written assignment / class participation marks are easy to get / finals was pretty straight forward (80+ raw) / effort-to-work ratio is pre decent - started studying during stuvac, covered everything in 3.5 days; had no idea on the content coz i was chilling throughout whole sem
Content: Pretty boring.
Lecturer: All are pre meh. Didn't go to many lectures anyways
Overall: 7/10
 
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obliviousninja

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TABL

Ease: No lectures/No hw; first assignment is writing a recount; second assignment bit more indepth. Finals was okay expecting 38-40/50 raw
Content: Actually pretty interesting
Lectures: Didn't go to any
Overall: 7/10. Can cruise through entire sem. But just cbs doing major assignment
 

menodiks

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MATH2121
Ease: 6/10 - not as obvious as first year Differentials, some effort and work is necessary, more than other math courses I've done. Gets really fucked after Partial Differentials
Content: 4/10 - Seems very dry and unobvious how important DE's are
Lecturer: 4/10 - Anna Cai luckily you can skip her lectures since she posts up all worked examples she does during lectures, and thats all she actually does in lectures. "So yeah just copy off this example and we will move on lel"
Tutor: 2/10 - Zaidi? (some indian chick) - either comes 10minutes late or finishes 15 minutes early. Come completely unprepared to the class and has no idea how to do half the question as she makes obvious mistakes and goes "so who here has tried this question"
Overall: 5/10 Idk if it is just poorly run this year but a combination of trash has to make his course shit. Luckily u have some of tisdells vids for this

Math2521
Ease: 9/10 good ol complex anal-ysis. Just memorise key steps and should be easy enough. Though alot of messy algebra at times
Content: 8/10 good to see applications of complex numbers and thereoms being applied to real problems.
Lecturer: 8/10 - DJ Crocker just listen to the steps he does and should be fine
Tutor: ^
Overall: 9/10 nice easy 2nd yr maff course
Overall:
 

Queenroot

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PHYS1160 - Introduction to Astronomy:


Ease: 8/10

- Online quizzes: If you've studied thoroughly you should be fine with these quizzes. Some of the questions can be tough if you haven't studied though.
- Discussion posts: I spent hours doing this just so I could get decent marks, it took so much time to do these that I didn't have enough time to actually study the material. Basically make sure you have an essay style format, bonus marks for posting early, bonus marks for pictures, a proper referencing style and in-text citations. You have to put in a lot of time for this.
- Essay: Make sure to include pictures (relevant to argument) and put in a lot of extra information that the marker might not know, put in a lot of research (variety of reference sources) and you should be good.
- Short answer test: Holy crap, this was ridiculously time consuming. Took me at least 9 hours to do, so much research to answer the questions and didn't even end up with a good mark. Basically you have to be straight to the point with these questions, otherwise you'll get marks taken off, they were very harsh with marking for this.
- final exam: Very harshly marked. If you've studied (and remember all the details) you should do well. All of the questions are MC and it is timed.

Content: 10/10

Content for the course is interesting so I enjoyed it :D

Lecturers: 7/10

I had Jeremy Bailey. Average lecturer.


Tutor: 7/10

I had Steefan. He was a pretty hard marker.
 

Chocolatebubble

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PHYS1160 - Introduction to Astronomy:


Ease: 8/10

- Online quizzes: If you've studied thoroughly you should be fine with these quizzes. Some of the questions can be tough if you haven't studied though.
- Discussion posts: I spent hours doing this just so I could get decent marks, it took so much time to do these that I didn't have enough time to actually study the material. Basically make sure you have an essay style format, bonus marks for posting early, bonus marks for pictures, a proper referencing style and in-text citations. You have to put in a lot of time for this.
- Essay: Make sure to include pictures (relevant to argument) and put in a lot of extra information that the marker might not know, put in a lot of research (variety of reference sources) and you should be good.
- Short answer test: Holy crap, this was ridiculously time consuming. Took me at least 9 hours to do, so much research to answer the questions and didn't even end up with a good mark. Basically you have to be straight to the point with these questions, otherwise you'll get marks taken off, they were very harsh with marking for this.
- final exam: Very harshly marked. If you've studied (and remember all the details) you should do well. All of the questions are MC and it is timed.

Content: 10/10

Content for the course is interesting so I enjoyed it :D

Lecturers: 7/10

I had Jeremy Bailey. Average lecturer.


Tutor: 7/10

I had Steefan. He was a pretty hard marker.
brb going to change my gen ed for next sem before its too late
 

D94

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- final exam: Very harshly marked. If you've studied (and remember all the details) you should do well. All of the questions are MC and it is timed.
How can a MC be harshly marked?

The options might have been similar and thus confusing, but it was still fair.
 

Queenroot

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How can a MC be harshly marked?

The options might have been similar and thus confusing, but it was still fair.
Oh in some of them you have the option of choosing more than one answer. So if you miss one of them but have correctly selected other ones you still get zero.
 

happyHoodlum

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Math 1231:
Ease: 8/10
Content: 8/10 The content was fairly interesting, builds up from 1131 so the content wasn't too hard. Algebra was really repetitive, row echelon this and row echelon that.
Lecturers: 7/10 Pahor Malin (Calculus) was hilarious. He paused the lecture everytime he caught someone using their phone. As the semester went by, this became rather annoying. He used the blackboard to explain most of the concepts so the content was quite easy to follow.
Tutor: 9/10 I had some guy called Jamane for algebra, he was pretty cool, always went through the hard questions first which kept the lesson interesting. I had O'Brien for calculus who was very helpful, always handed out summary sheets which made studying for the finals easier.

COMP 1927
Ease: 7/10 I found this course to be quite challenging at times and it is very easy to fall behind.
Labs: Each week my lab partner and I had to do lab exercises which were quite challenging however they reinforced the content taught in the lectures quite well.
Quizes: We had to complete a quiz every fortnight which had only like 4 questions, pretty simple if you stay with the content.
Assignments: Basically, there are two assignments, the first assignment is an individual assignment which was quite difficult since the spec was quite a long read.The second assignment is basically a group project where we had to code two AI's, one Hunter and one Dracula. The basic aim is for the hunters to find the hiding Dracula. This was a really enjoyable assignment since my team really put in the effort.
Final Exam: Final exam was basically a 3 hour exam with a practical and theory parts. I found the practical part to be quite difficult in retrospect to past years. The theory part was fair, there were some non-trivial questions that were really time consuming.
Content: 9/10 I found this course to be highly demanding since there is so much content. However the content was highly interesting and useful since we are taught different data structures and algorithms which are highly relevant and applicable to different areas in comp sci.
Lecturer: 8/10 We had Jas or John or whatever was his name as the lecturer for the sem. Fairly well organised lecturer, tried to explain the content clearly with live coding however sometimes his explanations were not clear. To be fair I guess some of the content is not that easy to explain.
Tutor: 8/10 I forget his name however he was always very good at reinforcing the content learnt during the lectures and was always open to questions. Personally, I think he should try to finish all the tutorial questions since we never finish the questions during the tut.

BIOM 1010:
Ease: 6/10 Most difficult course this semester. Basically I had to do a group report which involved a presentation near the end of the semester. This task was fairly simple and you should able to get decent marks. Midway through semester, there were two online quizes that had to be completed. I found the first quiz to be all right however the second one was ridiculously difficult, took me half a day with the assistance of google and I still only managed a pass. Also the final exam was out of like 200 and was fucking hard.
Content: 7/10 I found the content to be quite difficult, maybe cause I didn't do biology in high school. Tbh the guest lecturer's content was more interesting than Ross's content.
Lecturer: 6/10: As mentioned above this course had a few guess lecturers, most of these lecturers explained their content clearly and were highly engaging. Ross, the main lecturer was really boring and not very engaging which made the lectures quite dull.
Tutor: 7/10 LOL I had so many different tutors for this course. Overall, most of the time they were fairly helpful.

SENG 1031:
Ease: 9/10 Fairly straight forward course. We learnt how to plan for large software systems and had to work as part of a team to submit weekly tasks which were quite simple if each member in your team does their part.
Content: 8/10 I found the content to be quite enjoyable since I was able to develop my planning and teamwork skills by doing the weekly submissions with my team.
Lecturer: 3/10: The lecturer was not engaging and simply read of the powerpoint slides. The lectures for this course were quite disappointing. I think by week 4 only like 10 people turned up.
Tutor: 8/10 The weekly meeting with the tutors were fairly relaxing, they basically clearly explained what we had to do each week. TBh tutors were very helpful in this course.
 

Queenroot

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MATH1041 - Stats for life and social sciences:


Ease: 8.5/10

- Online quizzes: Relatively easy. You get three attempts, however each attempt has different questions so don't think you can loophole it.
- Mid Sem: Again, relatively easy, just do the past papers and learn what's in them and you should be good.
- Lab test: If you know how to copy & paste, have learned where to find what in the manual, and done some rote learning for assumptions you should be good. The average for this test was very poor, however I did relatively well (I didn't even understand most of the content properly) but I knew how to use R. MAKE SURE YOU USE RSTUDIO AND NOT EXCEL. It is much easier and efficient.
- final exam: This was predictable but bollocks. They told us to write a news article for senior high school students for one of the questions. A lot of writing involved. Anyway, the easiest way to get a HD is to know all the hypothesis tests and when to apply them, know how to construct all the different types of confidence intervals, and most importantly, learn (rote) the assumptions you need for each hypothesis test.

Content: 5/10

Stats and stuff, not anything that great. What I got out of the course however was the many applications of stats and how to interpret stats used in journal articles.

Lecturers:

Justin - 7/10

Okay until it comes to conditional probability. After that I did not understand a single thing he was talking about.

Diana - 8/10

Extremely slow but she makes you understand stuff well and has some good analogies.

Tutor: 4/10

A lovely, sweet lady, but on average she got about 2 questions finished per hour. Her teaching wasn't that great/understandble.
 

Mitsunami

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MMAN2300 - Engineering Mechanics 2

Ease: 6/10

Acceleration analysis and vibration analysis takes a lot of work and time to do. Instant centers are just impossible for me.

Content: 6/10

Basically, this course is split into two parts; Part A deals with velocity/acceleration analysis and work-energy systems and you have to do this weird instant center method where you draw lots of lines and intersections to do velocity/acceleration analysis. Also, there is a very short topic regarding gears which are pretty easy to do. Part B deals with vibrations of 1 and 2 degrees of freedom systems as well as other types of vibrations. IMO Part B is the interesting topic in this course.

Also comes with 2 assignments and 4 quizzes (worth 5% each so it's ok if you flunk 1-2) as well as 2 labs worth 10% each (IIRC) so focus on the assignments and labs as well.

Lecturers:

Part A - Zhongxiao Peng: 7/10

Decent lecturer, always uploads her working for examples that she went through in the lectures. Can be too fast for some, personally she was a bit too fast for my liking.

Part B - Nicole Kessissoglou: 5/10

Had a rather awkward experience with her since MMAN1300 - she usually reads off slides although her notes are quite good. First couple of lectures were pretty bad so most students opted to not go. Usually just reads off slides, after the lack of attendance she kind of stepped up her game, but at that point I didn't go to her lectures at all.

Tutor: 8/10

Had two tutors, Felipe and Jack. Chill dudes, explains stuff pretty well and covered tutorials decently.

Overall: 6/10

Try to do all the problems and keep on practicing to get the feel of the types of questions that will pop out.


BIOM9420 - Clinical Laboratory Science

Ease: 6.5/10

Lots of things from different types of subjects to learn. Bull your way through the exams, but don't forget to brush up on the engineering-type problem solving questions.

Content: 7/10

You get a variety of topics from a variety of lecturers in many different aspects of biomedical engineering. Some of them are quite interesting, like DNA analysis and clinical imaging systems such as MRI or CT scans. The hard part is when you have to do all these engineering application-type questions. You do not really have a set equation to use, mostly you just have multiple variables and you combine those with basic equations such as ideal gas law to find another variable, and most of the time you don't really know what equation to use, if any.

Quizzes are pretty decent, some may be tricky but all questions are manageable.

The assignments require you to compile reports after a major lab session. An important thing to note is that you have to exactly match the criteria and bull a lot to get marks, because what my team did was match the criteria without bull and we got pretty crap marks. Or maybe the marker just hates us.

Lecturers: 6/10

Too many lecturers to count, notable ones are Megan Lord (the convenor for the course) and 'Big Boss' Ross Odell.

Tutor: 4/10

Had Brooke as a tutor, most of the time she speaks too fast and directs things too quickly. At least if slowed down her explanations are okay. But that happens rarely, if any, and she was gone for around half the semester.

Overall: 5/10

Some interesting topics, but too much assortment of content to go through. And the assignments just screwed me over, so I might be a bit biased.


ELEC1111 - Electrical and Telecommunications Engineering

Ease: 3/10

Even as a second year I find this course pretty challenging on its own. Try to do a lot of practice to get the hang of the type of questions that you may face.

Content: 6/10

Early content isn't really interesting, learning new theorems about circuits and how to simplify it. Later content adds new stuff such as inductors and capacitors, and then the end content which are digital logic and op-amps are the easiest to do. Transformers which are the very last topic is not in the exam this year.

Labs are pretty challenging depending on the week, but most of the time you just go in and try to do stuff and hope that it works. Midsems killed everyone without exception. Tutorial questions are usually (if not always) not a good indicator of question difficulty for exams, the discrepancy is too high. You do not get equation sheets for the exam, so be prepared to memorize equations.

Lecturers:

Had two lecturers, Vasillios (8/10) and Branislav (4/10). Vasillios is a pretty good lecturer, explains stuff well. Branislav is not quite branislife, drones on with a very dry and monotone voice which makes classes very, very boring and painful to go through.

Tutor: -/10

As soon as I learned that Branislav is my tutor, tutorials do not exist. It isn't compulsory to come, btw.

Overall: 5/10

Practice, practice, practice, and hope you do not get rekt. It may be futile, but one can dream.


MMAN2600 - Fluid Mechanics

Ease: 6.5/10

Doable with effort, I for one did not put enough effort and got screwed on the finals earlier today.

Content: 7/10

Some topics are pretty interesting. Computing parts are usually the best to do provided that it is the laboratory session, not the actual lecture. On a bigger scale the course revolves around the Bernoulli equation, the energy equation derived from Bernoulli and relating forces to again, Bernoulli. Besides that there are some other odds and ends such as linear and angular momentum, lift and drag forces, and so on.

There are 5 lab sessions, usually manageable with a good team and generally a race against time due to the amount of work you need to do, although it doesn't always happen.
Tutorials are not compulsory to attend, but it helps to go to get the type of questions on the exam which actually is quite similar to it.

There are two midsems, and provided that you studied (or crammed) pretty well the amount of topics covered per quiz should be manageable. The same problem in ELEC appears here; you do not get any equation sheets. What makes it hard here is that you usually also need to know values depending on what equation to use, although Tracie is pretty lenient on it, particularly on the final exam where if you know the working but just somehow forgotten that particular value you can explain that you forgot and use a placeholder or an estimate value for that. Not sure how that would be effective in gaining more marks in the exam, but at least you can try to squeeze some than not taking any marks.

The general 'homework'/study help system is called LearnSmart, basically a 40-MC/short answer question where you revise topics on the modules being taught. Easy 5% because you have infinite tries with no penalties, as long as you just finish the module.

Lecturers:

Had two lecturers, Shaun Chan (8/10) and Tracie Barber (7/10). Both are chill, I like Shaun more because he explains most of the topic and question examples in good depth. Tracie leans more on the theoretical side (has calculation parts too) so I don't find it too interesting, although she explains topics quite well also.

Tutor: -/10

Did not really bother to know, basically just a 'come-get answers-leave' session.

Overall: 7/10

The finals is pretty tricky, some questions just escaped me and some questions are just literally plug and play. Best thing to do is again, doing a variety of questions to get used to it.
 
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Acct1511

Ease-7/10
-As long as you keep up with material fairly methodical

Assessments - 6/10
-Assessments are a lot harder to score high marks in compared to acct1501. The 30% internal portion is not a dead give away. The first quiz worth 10% had an average of 50% raw for that test, the other two were considerably higher. All in all it was not at all easy to maximize the internal 30% and come in with 30/30 to final.

Final - 8/10
I felt the final this sem was very fair, previous year past papers that i did the questions were a lot tougher. With such a high weighting on the final your mark in this course is really driven by your performance in that exam

Overall -8/10
Great introductory course together with acct1501. I found it relatively interesting and enjoyed the seminar style format. I think it is seen as a WAM killer purely because of the assessment structure, heavy weighted final and relatively challenging internal assessments. The content itself is fairly standard.

Tabl1710

Ease - 8/10
Felt that the subject was fairly easy, relatively small consistent work needed to score well on assignments and able to cram the material fairly easily to score well on the final as long as you have paid attention throughout semester. However if you put little effort in and do no work in the semester, there is a heck of amount of content to memorize in a short time for the final and may turn out bad

Assessments - Reasonable assessments, only two assignments one on tort law and contract law. The first assignment is a lot smaller and can do well in, although you can lose marks for really little things. The second major assignment is on contract law and is very fair, i feel that your mark in it is correlated to your effort, if they see that you have researched extensively for it you will do well.
The final exam was very straight forward, they tell you in advance what the problem questions are and what lectures the short answer q's will come from so makes studying for it easier.

Great course as long as you put consistent effort in you will do well and i have to say one of the more enjoyable and informative courses. I think it is a great elective to choose for commerce, it is great to have some basic legal knowledge on some of these key areas, so content is useful.
 

obliviousninja

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I went to no lectures. Like not even joking. 0.

Chilled the entire sem for tabl.
 

Queenroot

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PATH2201 - Processes in Disease:


Ease: 7.5/10

- Tutorial quizzes: Tough. Need to have studied thoroughly and know the details. MC uses the "Choose the most correct answer" format. Luckily you get to do it individually then as a group and the score is average. So make sure you study, don't let your team down.
- Media Assignment: This took me around 3 weeks to do. Be very detailed, and follow the marking criteria very closely and you should be fine. Some of the marks taken off were stupid. When you state your research question, make sure you put a question mark at the end of it, otherwise you'll get 0/5 for that section.
- E-portfolio: This was easy to do, but a little annoying and quite repetitive. Basically you submit reflections throughout the course on the material, assessments and the future etc.
- Online formative assessment: Easiest assessment. Untimed, unlimited attempts until the due date. If you don't get full marks for this then I pity you.
- final exam: 20 (very tough) MC and 4 short answers. I thought it was a fair exam even though I know I screwed up. Some of the questions are like "state the risk factors of this disease - 10 marks" and you run out of things to write. So I wasn't sure how detailed they wanted the answers to be. Most of your marks would be coming from the writing part so make sure you study each topic in detail and sequence (Epidemiology/Risk factors, Aetiology, Pathogenesis, Clinical Manifestations, Microscopic/Macroscopic pathology and Complications).

Content: 10/10

Very interesting.

At first when you start the course you'll be like OMG there's so much to know, but eventually you will get used to it. Just study consistently throughout the semester (you're going to have a bad time if you leave everything till last minute) and you should do pretty well. It's a good idea to have biochemistry or microbiology under your belt before you do this subject, because I didn't and struggled with some of the concepts. It's not necessary but it will help. Overall just study each disease/topic systematically taking into account - Epidemiology/Risk factors, Aetiology, Pathogenesis, Clinical Manifestations, Microscopic/Macroscopic pathology and Complications.

Lecturers:

Velan - 9/10

So many terrible and funny puns. Alright lecturer, keeps you entertained. However goes very quickly through the lecture.

Tedla - 9/10

Funny and has an adorable accent. Lets you bludge a bit by telling you "don't need to know this unless you're a freak".

Kumar - 10/10

Sounds like Stewie from Family Guy. Will keep you at the edge of your seat through some serious David Attenborough narration of the lecture. An extremely wise and well learned academic. Don't skip his lectures!

Polly - 6/10

She knows what she's doing. She teaches well, however she will set off a spell and send you to sleep.

Tutors:

Stephanie - 9/10

Had her for my tute and she's an intelligent girl. Likes to pick on people so come prepared.

Betty Kan - 8/10

Had her for my Histopath lab and some lectures. She's intelligent and a well learned academic but she was SO SLOW. Needs to pick up a pace a little bit and it would be fine.

Verma - 7/10

Had her for my Museum specimens. She likes to test people so come prepared. She is alright.
 

Squar3root

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MMAN2300 - Engineering Mechanics 2

Ease: 2/10

Rip for most students because this is a huge step up from 1300. You jump straight into the deep end of the more advanced concepts from that course but it is alright if you can keep up

Content: 5/10

read 5 posts ago

Pretty boring but straight forward, topics are split up quite distinctively

Lectures
I didn't go to any lectures but I watched them online

the asian one: 3/10 difficult to understand, rushed working

the white one: 3/10 just read of lecture slides didn't do many examples didn't finish the course

Tutors
Oak and the white guy: 8/10

pretty good they rushed their work sometimes and was difficult to keep up but answered questions well and explained things good

Overall
pretty good course that is why I am going to do it again next year
 

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