UNSW Subject Reviews. (4 Viewers)

[Notsuree]

ECON3101 - Markets and Frictions:

Ease: 9/10

Content was fairly straightforward, which coupled with a nice assessment structure (only a mid-sem and final), made the course pretty easy. I actually found this course slightly easier than ECON2101.

Content: 8/10

The content was certainly interesting; a more robust approach was applied to concepts covered in Micro 1 / Micro 2, while several new concepts were also introduced.

Lecturer: 9/10

Benoit Julien - Really good; explained concepts pretty well and had solid lecture slides. He made the exams pretty straightforward, so that's a bonus ahah.

Tutor: 0.5/10

Can't remember his name, but he was useless. Tutes were pointless ...

Overall: 8.5/10

Would recommend - pretty easy marks and interesting stuff.

 

[Clara_Oswald]

Has anyone done BIOS1101 recently and is able to tell me a bit about the course ? I can't seem to find anything online. Biggest question - is it easy to do well in?

 

[bluekoala]

CHEM1031 - Higher Chemistry A
Ease: 9/10
I found the materials to be okay, I think doing most of the tutorial problems is very useful.

Content: 8/10
The first few lectures is on Ideal Gas Laws, which is one of the easiest topics in this course. Then it suddenly became harder because of Atomic Structure. Luckily I've previously learned atomic orbitals. I just hated the thermochem part of this course. And also lots of (chem) calculations in this course.

Lecturer: 8/10
My first lecturer was Jon Beeves (7/10), his lectures were engaging, and he gave some questions to practice. And then we had Marcus Cole (8/10), a bit monotone I think, but he gave multiple choice questions from zeetings and it was quite fun. He also gave out chocolates to people who answered questions in the lectures. He actually knows the stuffs he's teaching so I guess it's good. Our last lecturer was Scott Kable (9/10), which is the head of school of chem, and he's actually really good at teaching. He also brought demonstration to the lectures and I think it helped me understand things. My only problem was that he didn't really explain some things (like entropy) very clearly.

Tutor: 9/10
I had Anna Choy and I really like the way she teach, she focused on tutorial problems and teaching key ideas from the topics in the lectures. She also let students to pick which questions to do.

Overall: 8.5/10

COMP1917 - Computing 1
Ease: 6/10
I have never learned programming before so this course was quite hard for me, and also their assessment is a bit weird, requiring you to blog and make a portfolio at the end of the semester.

Content: 8/10
The theory and practical contents were very useful I guess, especially if you're doing compsci. A good introduction to programming.

Lecturer: 8/10
We had 2 "sets" of lectures, live lectures with Angela Finlayson and video lectures with Richard Buckland (recorded some years ago). I really like Angela Finlayson, she explained things clearly in the lecture. I actually prefer the live lectures than the video lectures, but some people prefer Richard Buckland because he's more engaging I think, but sometimes he talked about things that were tangents to the topics. Oh and he used lots of anecdotes to explain things and I think it was good also.

Tutor: 9/10
My tutor was also a student but she's good, so helpful. Most of the tutors in this course are really helpful because they also did this course previously.

Overall: 8/10

MATH1131 - Mathematics 1A
Ease: 7/10
I didn't do really well in this course but then again I didn't do most of the tutorial problems. Only studied before class tests.

Content: 7/10
Lots of theorems, divided into 2 lecture streams, algebra and calculus. Algebra was a bit hard in the beginning of the course but then it became easier than calculus.

Lecturer: 3/10
I had Bill Ellis (7/10) for Algebra, he doesn't really use the microphone but I think that's okay. I think his notes were easy to understand and his examples were effective.
And Trevor McDougall (0/10) for Calculus, AVOID THIS LECTURER AT ALL COST. I would recommend anyone to go to Peter Brown's lectures instead.

Tutor: 7/10
Nothing much to say about the tutors, they're alright.

Overall: 6/10


PHYS1121 - Physics 1A
Ease: 5/10
Also didn't do really well in this course, didn't finish any of the problem set. Exam was terrible.

Content: 6/10
Some of the materials were irrelevant for engineering, but maybe useful if you intend to major in Physics. Mechanics is really hard, I found thermodynamics and oscillations to be better.

Lecturer: 7/10
We had John Webb (5/10) for mechanics and he just read everything from the slides, don't go to his lectures, it's just wasting time, instead try to do the problems. And then Alex Hamilton (9/10) I think he's really good, and he also brought demo to the lectures (lots of liquid nitrogen and fire). Also did lots of derivations which turned out to be useful for the exam.

Tutor: 7/10
We didn't really have tutorials, but we had problem solving workshops instead. I had Seb Fricke for the workshop (and also lab) and I think he was good at explaining, and also very helpful at labs.

Overall: 6/10

 

[Queenroot]

Has anyone done BIOS1101 recently and is able to tell me a bit about the course ? I can't seem to find anything online. Biggest question - is it easy to do well in?

Would be a whole lot of rote learn

 

[Hunny]

ECON2101 Microeconomics 2
Background:
This is one of the compulsory courses for Economics students or Economics majors. It builds upon some knowledge from ECON1101 Microeconomics 1 and is particularly useful for future Economics courses such as ECON3101, ECON3121, ECON3123, etc. It's just a pre-requisite to the many higher level microeconomics courses. I found this course to be particularly interesting because it is an extension of ECON1101 which was also really interesting carrying over and extending beyond HSC Economics. I also took this course in Semester 1 btw.

Ease: 8/10
Some students have trouble and some don't - I happened to be the one that didn't struggle at all in this course (which means I could be very biased in my review, I apologise). The course happens to have a lot of mixed reviews. Some concepts are carried from ECON1101, but mostly you'll revisit these in the form of perfect competition, monopolies, oligopolies, game theory (although there is more of an extension of game theory in this course), utility functions, etc. About 70% of the course will be something new or something you've never heard or seen before. Fairly basic stuff but building towards more of deriving, solving and some thinking involved. Some topics are linked to each other especially the one with all the types of competition - you'll notice patterns and solving these market structures will be fairly easy. Complete ALL the quizzes! I expect people who have general economics knowledge to be able to get an easy Credit for this. Quizzes are easy marks. Mid-sem exam was actually pretty tough compared to the finals and the exams were weighted 30% and 35% respectively... Harsh, as with the head lecturer for this course anyway... Keiichi...

Content: 7/10
Can be daunting trying to learn the concepts and applying them, but do make use of the textbook - it contains so many summarised formulas that you need, and explains many of them in detail using examples. It helped me and it will help you! Lectures don't do much for your quizzes. Learn all the different kinds of equilibria (from General Equilibrium to Subgame Perfect Nash Equilbrium...), types of competition, dynamic and static games/strategies, and some mathematics - mainly partial derivatives and some other calculus stuff. The maths is not hard as long as you've done some calculus work during HSC then you'll be A-OKAY!

Lectures: 8/10
I had Keiichi for the first half of the semester and JC for the next half. Keiichi is fairly harsh and will shun dumb students by not being very helpful. JC is funny and is a good lecturer but his emphasis on formality in economics (especially during game theory) is just like wtf pls it just confuses people... We lose marks because we don't follow his 'formality' method... In the end JC > Keiichi anyday.

Tutorials: 9/10
I forgot my tutor's name but he was hard to understand sometimes. Tutorials were just there to solve quizzes.

Interests: ?/10
Can be either dry, boring or interesting. My friend absolutely hated this course yet I found it to be really fun!

Overall: 10/10
Wouldn't recommend as a free elective to those outside of business, but definitely an okay free elective if you've done ECON1101 already lol

 

[Hunny]

ECON2206 Introductory Econometrics
Background:
This is one of the compulsory courses for Economics students or Economics majors. It builds upon some knowledge from ECON1203 Business Statistics mainly regression (ugh, loved regression) and is a pre-requisite for ECON3208 which is a good course to do for honours, masters or anything that involves data, research and modelling.

Ease: 6/10
Not an easy course but it IS introductory so just grasp as much knowledge as you can about how to conduct regressions, how to solve modelling problems and how to improve your models, etc. ECON3208 is not even easy and does require some high level thinking and knowledge - probs like 3x harder than this course. The finals were fair since our lecturer was particularly nice on us.

Content: 7/10
Regression for most of the semester: how to model, how to predict the model, how to spot errors in the model, how to fix the model, how to improve the model, etc; and then some time-series and some panel data near the end of semester. I would consider it very boring just trying to read up on the textbook and not knowing much in the end.

Lectures: 7/10
I had Denzil, he is a very nice lecturer but the lecture can be boring after the first 45 minutes especially since the lecturer started at 9am and some people just get tired around that time. He does these mini quizzes during the lectures but the answers don't appear in the lecture recording so please make an effort to go to the lecture since the mini quizzes are some of the actual questions in the final exam.

Tutorials: 10/10
Martin, coolest tutor ever haha - He jokes (some are very bad jokes - like bad bad meaning they can be offensive) but otherwise he doesn't make tutorial questions compulsory which means I didn't do any tutorial questions and that put me in a shitty spot for the finals because I didn't know how to answer those questions.

Interests: 5/10
Not so interesting and is still covering the basics with some economic application and interpretation but nonetheless it was broad and not so intuitive at times.

Overall: 6/10
Not very fun to say the least, but there shouldn't be a problem passing this course.

 

[Hunny]

FINS1613 Business Finance
Background:
Compulsory for Finance majors. It is also offered as a general education or free elective to others. Requires very basic math and the use of finance formulas to solve simple business problems. Some very basic accounting knowledge can help but is not needed.

Ease: 7/10
Fairly straightforward. The maths is not hard but the questions that use these formulas can be worded to trick you so be wary. These tricks in the wording of the questions is enough to throw any student off course requiring usually another step or process in the working out in order to derive the solution. It is because of this that this course can be a little challenging even just after memorising several formulas which is why I gave this a 7/10 and not an 8/10.

Content: 7/10
Basic financial maths and a lot of background about finance and the intuition behind the use of many formulas such as risk and decision-making, how much should a firm need to raise in debt or equity, the pricing of firms, expected returns, etc.

Lectures: ?/10
I skipped all lectures.

Tutorials: 9/10
Lectures were summarised here and the tutorial slides contained everything in summarised form including generic quiz answers. Contribution to answer quiz questions gives you the free marks you need for participating in class.

Interests: 6/10
It definitely wasn't exciting because I struggled to remember some formula and also I confused myself everytime with the time period when doing 2 stage discounting and the such. I also got tricked by every question.

Overall: 6/10
Not fun but useful in some aspects of life *hmm* and FINS2624. I definitely thought I was going to get a shitty result but I surprised myself.

 

[Hunny]

TABL1710 Business and the Law
Background:
Oh boy. The law. Condensed. For business students. This course is a joke to any Law students anyway. It is an interesting course especially if the only laws you know were not business related, or many laws that you do know but didn't know also apply to businesses. This course is an elective for Commerce students and is a free elective to other students.

Ease: 5/10
Easy for some people and not so easy for others. It's heavy on the writing and I am not a good essay/response writer so I particularly sucked when I tried to elaborate my reasoning or understanding about concepts. It was a struggle for me to read and memorise everything but the textbook was my bible, however the lecturer DOES require independent research and outside reading mainly for the major assignment. rip

Content: 9/10
Good content but it becomes tedious to memorise the parts, sections and statements of law. I actually loved the cases and the textbook was a good read.

Lectures: ?/10
I skipped all lectures.

Tutorials: 9/10
Very intuitive tutor if that makes any sense. He was interesting and explained everything clearly, when and why such law applies and why you should be careful when addressing law.

Interests: 10/10
Interesting yet not so easy of a course. You'll discover some of the exciting parts of law and how it relates to businesses. Some parts of law were contradictory or unintuitive or quirky which makes it exciting to discuss and read about the cases that had weird decisions and conclusions, much like the soft Australian law we see today which sparks a lot of controversy.

Overall: 6/10
If you're a Commerce student then definitely do this course as for your Commerce compulsory elective thingy. If you're not a Commerce student then there is no need to do this semi-WAM killer here.

 

[indigoflamingo]

Has anyone done MGMT1101 by any chance? Any thoughts on it?

BTW- if anyone's selling course packs for MATH 1141 & 11241 or MATH1151 & MATH1251, please let me know!

 

[He-Mann]

MATH3811/MATH3911 – (Higher) Statistical Inference

Ease: 6/10 – The first five chapters of the course are actually difficult to go through, especially with the tutorial questions. The midsem afaik is difficult for a lot of people, and if you are not given previous midsems from other students then you may have a hard time studying for it. The latter five chapters though are ezpz and are crammable within 1-2 days of study. Assignments are pretty easy since if you get previous years stuff then you can twist and tweak some stuff - true for 3811 but for 3911 they have extra questions that they change every year. For the final exam, the first four questions of both papers are the same, then in 3911 you have two extra questions in which they are very difficult. That said if you answer the first four questions completely correct with a somewhat decent pre-final mark (i.e. 30-35/40) then HD (85) is definitely achievable.

Content: 7/10 – A lot of content is pretty dry up until the last 5 chapters. A lot of content, but in which a lot of it isn't assessed in the final exam (i.e. bootstrap, jackknife and robustness). The last 5 chapters are actually relevant to research fields in medical science, biology, biostatistics, etc, and you can see quite a bit of overlapping content with it.

Lecturer: Spiridon Penev – 7/10 – If you don't mind his accent then he is actually pretty good. Explains things alright but can get confusing. Also generally good in the way he sets assessment tasks (very fair assessment tasks) such that you can scrap a HD if you work well enough but just hard to get above 90.

Tutor: Heng Lian - never went to tutorials so would have no idea about what he is like.

Teaching Resources: The assignment solutions were released for each of the two assignments (very good), the midterm solutions were released, but past midterm exams should also be released for the sake of fairness for other students. The 2006 finals for both 3811 and 3911 were released, but you had to work out the stuff on your own, that said fair enough it should be easy to work out provided you know your stuff well enough inside out.

Overall: 8/10 – Your mark in this course can highly depend on your ability to scab the correct resources from previous students. So get resources off people who have previously done this course. Passing this course is ezpz but most people taking this course should aim to get DN/HD.

What kind of prejudiced and worthless review is this? The main point you're trying to illuminate is that this course is easy if you have past semester resources (including assessments and essentially copying the solutions or prepping for a test ASSUMING that you know the assessments are recycled (or tweaked slightly) each semester). Further, you are basically encouraging cheating and exposed yourself. The rest of the review is as biased as most other reviews.

What have you learnt from this course conditioned on the fact that you cheated? Also, why did you cheat?

Edited in bold for clarification

 

[leehuan]

What kind of prejudiced and worthless review is this? The main point you're trying to illuminate is that this course is easy if you have past semester resources. Further, you are basically encouraging cheating and exposed yourself. The rest of the review is as biased as most other reviews.

What have you learnt from this course conditioned on the fact that you cheated? Also, why did you cheat?

How does having past semester resources equate to cheating

 

[He-Mann]

How does having past semester resources equate to cheating

Did you read his review?

He implies assessments are essentially recycled.

 

[leehuan]

Did you read his review?

He implies assessments are essentially recycled.

So?

 

[He-Mann]

So?

What's your point?

 

[leehuan]

What's your point?

I don't see how asking for some resources from previous students is a form of cheating. You're just asking for their stuff to help you do your work.

If the course actually sets the same assessment task every sem then unless they just don't care then I see it as their fault. They were essentially taking the risk of expecting oh they won't ask previous students for their resources. Pretty sure they would've considered the possibility of past assignments being handed down as well.

How were you to just know, upon enrolling for the course (aside from being informed), that they set the same assignment every semester?

 

[He-Mann]

I don't see how asking for some resources from previous students is a form of cheating. You're just asking for their stuff to help you do your work.

If the course actually sets the same assessment task every sem then unless they just don't care then I see it as their fault. They were essentially taking the risk of expecting oh they won't ask previous students for their resources. Pretty sure they would've considered the possibility of past assignments being handed down as well.

How were you to just know, upon enrolling for the course (aside from being informed), that they set the same assignment every semester?

No, when you receive the assignments for the current semester, then you can consult previous semester resources and if it had been similar, then you get an advantage. Clearly, this guy was in this situation. Academic dishonesty.

He also implies that assignment questions just get tweaked slightly.

 

[leehuan]

No, when you receive the assignments for the current semester, then you can consult previous semester resources and if it had been similar, then you get an advantage. Clearly, this guy was in this situation. Academic dishonesty.

He also implies that assignment questions just get tweaked slightly.

So? Anyone could've asked for these resources if they knew the same people. Explain how knowing people who did the course in advance is a case of academic dishonesty when this was not something nobody else could've done.

Not sure if he intended to imply that about assignments but if they do then it's not his fault?

 

[RenegadeMx]

MATH3411 - Ciphers, cryptology etc
Ease: 10/10
Theres a reason its known as easiest third year math course, just revise on a weekly basis and should have HD

Content: 2/10
Useful to know the theory behind how computers and data transmission work, however it is quite useless compared to other math topics, only good for a WAM booster imo

Lecturer: Britz - 9/10
Nice and friendly tries to make it exciting, can get carried away with unexaminable content tho and sometimes over explains

Tutor: 9/10
same as above

Overall: 10/10
Easy if u dont neglect it, still easy pass if u cram last minute

MATH3531 - DIfferential Geometry/ Topology

Ease: 4/10
Hard as fuck, a lot of definitions to know, midsem and final will rape you bad, midsem had avg of 17/30 or so, final will probs be similar. Put effort into the assignment if you want to pass as final is only 45% hence why the ease is 4/10 instead of 1/10.

Content: 2/10
Its useful in regards to mathematical progression, right now though I dont see how it is useful when all the theory and stuff is 200years old and doesnt really benefit you at all

Lecturer - Steele 5/10
Not much too say monotone voice, does attempt to make it interesting but the overal content is dry

Tutor
as above

Overall 2/10
Goodluck if ur doing education/maths - its compulsory for you, if your doing just maths I dont recommend doing this whatsoever, unless you have interest in the area.

edst4080 - Special Education

Ease: 8/10
Standard education course, if you know how to research and write essays will be a walk in the park

Content: 5/10
Too much abbreviations for all the special needs and diseases, some useful things to use but overall the main message from the course is, only when you have someone with disability in your class, do proper research and strategies to help them

Lecturer: Grima-Farrell 1/10 + guest lecturers (varies)
Varies

Tutor: Molholland 6/10
Generally helpful with questions and assignments but tutorials were boring, could be cause course is dry in general.

If attendance wasnt compulsory would be lucky to see even 1/4 in either lectures/tutorials

Overall: 5/10
Compulsory unit, but not too difficult

Edst4084 - Managing the classroom

Ease: 9/10 get 20% of your overall grade for free for doing some easy online modules, other essays vary in difficulty

Content: 10/10 - One of the more useful areas in education - classroom management

Lecture: O'Neill - 5/10
Some interesting stuff she says, but is boring in her delivery

Tutor: Danker - 5/10
Dunno what to say, pretty average tutor

Overall: 8/10 good tips and straightforward

 

[He-Mann]

So? Anyone could've asked for these resources if they knew the same people. Explain how knowing people who did the course in advance is a case of academic dishonesty when this was not something nobody else could've done.

Not sure if he intended to imply that about assignments but if they do then it's not his fault?

Handing in assignments and presenting your ideas as your own when most (if not all) of the idea was generated by the past semester resources is academic dishonesty.

In his situation, he had access to solutions to, say most of the questions of, the mid-sem and rote learnt it. Assuming someone told him the mid-sems don't change much, how can this not be cheating?

 

[leehuan]

Handing in assignments and presenting your ideas as your own when most (if not all) of the idea was generated by the past semester resources is academic dishonesty.

In his situation, he had access to solutions to, say most of the questions of, the mid-sem and rote learnt it. Assuming someone told him the mid-sems don't change much, how can this not be cheating?

So you're saying, that if hypothetically someone gave everyone all their resources from the previous semester then the entire cohort is going to be failed for academic misconduct? I think, if you reckon that something should be dealt about students passing on information then you need to raise it up with the maths department to never set similar things and confuse the students instead.

What's the problem with acquiring information to benefit their study? The way I see cheating is purposefully looking at something you were never given a right to, but a students' own material is their own stuff and they have that right. And it's not plagiarism unless it's clear that word for word replications have been made. I fail to see how passing on information constitutes academic misconduct.

Because this isn't a question about ethics. It's only about principles themselves. I don't see anything that has been defied just by asking the experienced for help in any way whatsoever.

In fact, it also makes you wonder how they obtained the information. Don't you at least suspect that the information has been passed around further more than just one cohort? Maybe even 5 cohorts?