Subject Reviews (with PDF compilation) (2 Viewers)

[Triangulum]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

Hey Triangulum, thanks for that review on ANHS1005. It's always been a unit of study that has interested me. Hell I might even take it up next year. Kathryn Welch... she wouldn't be the author of some ancient history textbook I used in the HSC, amirite?

She may well be, a lot of ancient history lecturers do that sort of thing. Kathryn's not running the junior course next year though, Jeffrey Tatum will be doing it instead.

 

[Nebuchanezzar]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

I hope all of you get scaled to fail marks, and then come back and revise your Ease ratings.

'Sif. I'm aware that I will possibly fail chemistry owing to that awful last exam, but that doesn't affect my ease mark.

 

[Iheartpaulfrank]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

I thought I was the only one who liked to use 'sif'. Bugger you.

 

[Nebuchanezzar]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

And 'sif ease is going to be affected by a scaled mark. lol.

 

[stazi]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

ok, let's say the subject is easy in terms of content. However, due to the ease of it, your 60% becomes a 40%, and you fail the subject. Does this make the subject easy, necessarily? Well, in terms of content, yes. But then again you may need to aim for 70% to pass, instead of 50%, which makes it more difficult.

 

[Kwayera]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

Woah Neb, you did Verts? You must have seen me asleep in the lectures on many occasions!

 

[Nebuchanezzar]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

Woah Neb, you did Verts? You must have seen me asleep in the lectures on many occasions!

You're Catriona (sp?) who talked about birds in her speech. I have red hair. Who am I?

Also, Malfoy, I heard social perspectives was meant to be bad.

 

[Kwayera]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

Curly red hair-ish?!

 

[Nebuchanezzar]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

Mebbe.

<_<
>_>
<_<

I think I may have been reading Crime and Punishment at one point in time!?!?!?!?
Also, when Gary gave his speech and mentioned George W. Bush, I sensed you were upset since you asked him a subsequent question, which was somewhat funny.

 

[Triangulum]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

HSTY1088 Australian History: An Introduction
Lecturer: Dr James Curran

Ease: 8.5/10. Content-wise, there was nothing that was much of a stretch, although some weeks there was a ton of reading. (The 'Debating the Bush' tute in particular: there was a massive article about Tom Roberts' painting Shearing the Rams as well as quite a lot of other stuff, and most people in my tute struggled to get through it all.) In terms of assessment, the load was pretty average. There was a 500-word source analysis type thing, which I thought asked us to do a bit too much given the word limit, but it wasn't really that much of a problem. Other than that, hand-in assessment consisted of a 2000-word essay, for which there were a lot of questions to choose from (17, to be precise) and handy reading lists. The exam also seemed fair to me, with a decent balance between broad sweeping themes and more specific topical areas. Overall, it was about average difficulty for a junior arts course.

Lecturer: 8.5/10. James really knows his stuff, particularly about national identity and politics (which was his PhD topic). I felt his lectures were very strong on conceptual issues like identity, national legends, legacies of colonialism and so on which formed the basis of the course, although he was a bit weak on providing chronological/narrative background in some lectures. This was a problem because a lot of people (tons of American exchange students in this course, for some reason) hadn't studied Australian history before, and no one had studied Australian history before federation, which isn't covered in the School Certificate course. James also sometimes rushed through stuff - the lecture on Eureka was a standout in this regard - and there was no WebCT, which meant no recordings or slides to go back to if you missed it the first time. Those criticisms aside, James is an excellent lecturer and I'd fully recommend seeking out his other subjects.

Interest: 9/10. The course focused on Australian identity and it how it was imagined and transformed over the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This sounds like typical arts wankery, and in a sense it is, but I found it really fascinating - my particular favourite, which came up again and again, was the bush legend, the idea that Lawson, Paterson and co.'s disaffection with city life led them to idealise the bush in their work, and that this led to the idealisation of so-called bush values like mateship, the fair go, contempt for authority and so on, which still form a key part of 'Australianness', as well as creating the idea that the 'bushman' is the archetypal Australian despite Australia being a primarily urban country. I think this sort of thing is fascinating, which is the primary reason I enjoyed the course so much. I can imagine that people who didn't find this as interesting as I did would rate the course lower. Other important areas in the course were the White Australia Policy (both immigration and Aboriginal aspects), the ANZAC legend, Australia as a 'workingman's paradise' and a 'social laboratory', and how Australian identity is constructed and imagined today. I found all of this stuff really interesting as well.

Overall: 9/10. This course gave me a new perspective on Australian history and on modern Australia which has made me more appreciative of the country, which is probably a good thing. I'm now more interested in studying Australian history and am strongly considering changing my major from ANHS to HSTY in order to do it at honours level. Really good course, strongly recommended. (Shame they're cancelling it and replacing it with an entirely new course as of next year.)

 

[company_sin]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

Because I’m supposed to be writing a conference paper on Derrida, Hypertext Theory, and the Postmodern Gothic, have some reviews. Also, these are all from the English dept., so I won’t be giving course codes, only titles:

Contemporary American Literature

Ease: To do relatively well in this course, one needs not be the great of scholars. The expectations, generally, aren’t set too high; and the material, generally and if you’re into this sort of stuff, isn’t difficult. The only parts of this course which could be construed as difficult are, firstly, when the lecturers go off on theoretical tangents (and so they should!) and also Ashbery’s Girls on the Run, which, despite my being besotted with Ashbery, other people seemed to have trouble with.

Lecturers: There was an interesting good cop, bad cop dynamic happening with the lecturers on this course. That is to say, for Dr. Murphet, the whole world is fucked beyond belief, but for Dr. Hardie, it can be saved! All of the lecturers who deal with the new and, often, America literature are excellent.

Interest: Whatever I say here will be biased, as this is my area of interest. So, I’ll just list and give mention to some of the texts: Happiness (film) is all about paedophilia, The Corrections is the best book since Gravity’s Rainbow, Ashbery can have my babies, Random Family is beyond fascinating, and The Road is, perhaps, one of the most gripping books you’ll ever read.

Overall: 8/10.

American Romance

Ease: This course is very simple, and yes, I mean this disparagingly. It covers the canon of nineteenth century American literature, excluding only Moby Dick. The assessment is this: one essay (90%) and one seminar paper (10%). You are allowed to deal with the same text(s) twice over, which, in my opinion, is absurd.

Lecturers: Dr. Kelly is good fun, and he really knows his stuff. However, the two hour seminar was taken up, every week, by seminar papers, so you don’t hear much from him. Rather, he acts as a facilitator.

Interest: The course itself was relatively dull, but the texts carried it along. This being said, I liked the texts because I’m a huge fan of Hawthorne, Whitman, Crane, and Dreiser; if you’re not, just don’t bother with the course, as you won’t get a thing out of it. Well, at least I learnt some stuff about nineteenth century American lit, an area on which my knowledge was previously quite hazy!

Overall: 5/10.

The Language and the Canon

Ease: Ease? What ease? This course was difficult, very. The way that it’s structured is like this: First half deals with the development of the English language, from Old English through Early Modern, with two lectures on each period. Second half with King Lear, from all angles – textual, theoretical, theatrical, and so on. The essays I wrote for this unit (two of 3,000wds) were on the following topics: an assessment of James Joyce’s parody of Old through Early Modern English in Ulysses. That’s right, an assessment of Joyce, after six lectures on the language. The other was 7,000wd (I killed the wd limit) essay on the evolution of the noun ‘pudder’ which may or may not appear in King Lear.

Lecturers: The English dept.’s old guns came out for this one. Expect idiosyncratic, well rehearsed, lectures made of intellectual gold; and tutorials of Dr. Gardiner’s own strange view on things, which is often fascinating.

Interest: If you’re curious about what makes English English, then you’ll like this course.

Over: 7/10.

More later, when I shall eviscerate The Text and the bloody Critic.

 

[Ennaybur]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

I know the exam for this subject is tomorrow, but given that I find exams harder than assessments there's no way the ease rating will be revised

ENGL1007 - Language, Texts and Time

Ease - 0/10 and if I could give it a negative number I would do so

This is hands-down the hardest course I have ever taken at university. It has a very, very complex textbook along with a 500-page reader brick, which lets you know from the very outset that this course is going to be not only very intensive and a lot of work, but a lot of hard work.

The assessment is broken down into two grammatical exercises (15% each), in which I failed the first one and by some miracle scraped a pass in the second one. These are ridiculously hard, and vague to boot. I spent longer writing those exercises than I usually do on major essays -- and I still only managed to either guess or Google the answers to half the questions.

There's a major essay (1,500 words; 40%) which is rather difficult because the questions were pretty esoteric, but I found one on intellectual property which meant I could somehow twist it into a political/historical essay. It's scary that the essay was the easiest part of the assessment schedule because it seriously took a lot more work than most do.

The exam (30%) is tomorrow and judging by practice exams available on WebCT, I'll be lucky to salvage five marks from it. Seriously, we're expected to know the phonetic alphabet, a million complex grammar rules, poetry techniques, Old and Middle English and a bunch of semiotics and cram that all into a 90-minute exam. I'm doomed.

To put it simply, I ended up being totally lost by the end of the first two weeks and never recovered. It remains the only subject in which I have ever failed an assessment, and as far as I know I've not spoken to anyone who's really done exceptionally well in it. Even the WebCT anonymous discussion boards are filled with people who are totally lost.

I'm doing two senior English courses this semester and even if you combine them in difficulty it doesn't touch this course. I don't know what the fuck the English department were thinking when they made this a first year course.

Lecturer - Nick Riemer, 5/10

I stopped attending lectures after a while because I got too confused, and Eastern Avenue auditorium didn't have anywhere convenient for me to plug my laptop in so I couldn't type up notes (my laptop has a very, very short battery life) anyway. Nick Riemer is a nice guy and very approachable, but he's softly spoken and doesn't explain things particularly well. He seemed to waffle for a fair bit and launched into insanely complex topics without much background or explanation.

I'd mark him down but the fact he made himself so available for consultation and on WebCT was a real bonus - you really needed the clarification sometimes!

Interest - 2/10

I thought this could be interesting (most first year English subjects are pretty awful and this looked to be the best) but I don't have much to say about it because I zoned out very early on due to the overly technical and complex nature of the subject. The fact that I ended up so lost meant that I stopped being interested very early on. In fact, I wouldn't even be able to tell you what went on in more than one or two of the tutorials because I just ended up daydreaming (or occasionally writing fic on my laptop).

Overall - 1/10

Like I said earlier, this could have been an interesting course but they just crammed too much into it. Not only did they cram a lot of material in, but it was a lot of complex material. This could easily have been two or three courses. It was just too much to learn.

I will never understand why they made this a first year course. It was much more difficult than any senior English unit I have ever done and it would have probably been better as a 3000-level unit - no, I'm not kidding, that's how difficult it was!

agreed. it's a bit too much for one subject, or it could just be simplified.

 

[stazi]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

do honours or ill cry

 

[Iheartpaulfrank]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

Yeah me too. :'(

PHIL is awesome, innit?

 

[jpr333]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

Yeh i must agree M&A kinda sucked... Whilst it was a somewhat interesting glance into the IB world, it was run cruddily.

 

[bustinjustin]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

ASNS2663 Social Activism in Southeast Asia

Ease: 8.5/10
No final exam in the block, but a small in-class test, 1 hour, 4 questions, a cinch. Readings were heavy, but they were also very generous with tute participation marks. Essay heavily weighted at 45%, but assessment and several lectures were devoted to better help us write decent essays. Themes were explicitly consistent, so easy to keep on track even with minimal effort. That said, I would've given it a 9/10 but my raw mark of 86.2 was scaled down to 82, stupid bell curve.

Lecturers (Michele Ford): 9/10
Since the class was pretty small, lectures were pretty interactive and interspersed with group discussion. They try to learn names as well since it's so small (only ever 20-30 in a lecture most weeks), plus most were recorded. There was a spate of guest lecturers for about 4 weeks towards the end of the course, but Thushara or Michele would actually explain at the end how guest-lecture material fit into the course.

Interest: 10/10
Lots of variety in topics and teaching methods, with lots of eye-opening, dramatic, even haunting videos on refugee, nationalist, environmental and even gay movements, actual NGO work in Southeast Asia.

Overall: 9/10
Am slightly bitter that they scaled down my raw HD mark, but it remains the most enjoyable unit for the semester, and one of the best organised and taught courses around (which is impressive for its inaugral year).

 

[KarmaKitten]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

HSTY1088 Australian History: An Introduction
Lecturer: Dr James Curran

Ease: 8.5/10. Content-wise, there was nothing that was much of a stretch, although some weeks there was a ton of reading. (The 'Debating the Bush' tute in particular: there was a massive article about Tom Roberts' painting Shearing the Rams as well as quite a lot of other stuff, and most people in my tute struggled to get through it all.) In terms of assessment, the load was pretty average. There was a 500-word source analysis type thing, which I thought asked us to do a bit too much given the word limit, but it wasn't really that much of a problem. Other than that, hand-in assessment consisted of a 2000-word essay, for which there were a lot of questions to choose from (17, to be precise) and handy reading lists. The exam also seemed fair to me, with a decent balance between broad sweeping themes and more specific topical areas. Overall, it was about average difficulty for a junior arts course.

Lecturer: 8.5/10. James really knows his stuff, particularly about national identity and politics (which was his PhD topic). I felt his lectures were very strong on conceptual issues like identity, national legends, legacies of colonialism and so on which formed the basis of the course, although he was a bit weak on providing chronological/narrative background in some lectures. This was a problem because a lot of people (tons of American exchange students in this course, for some reason) hadn't studied Australian history before, and no one had studied Australian history before federation, which isn't covered in the School Certificate course. James also sometimes rushed through stuff - the lecture on Eureka was a standout in this regard - and there was no WebCT, which meant no recordings or slides to go back to if you missed it the first time. Those criticisms aside, James is an excellent lecturer and I'd fully recommend seeking out his other subjects.

Interest: 9/10. The course focused on Australian identity and it how it was imagined and transformed over the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This sounds like typical arts wankery, and in a sense it is, but I found it really fascinating - my particular favourite, which came up again and again, was the bush legend, the idea that Lawson, Paterson and co.'s disaffection with city life led them to idealise the bush in their work, and that this led to the idealisation of so-called bush values like mateship, the fair go, contempt for authority and so on, which still form a key part of 'Australianness', as well as creating the idea that the 'bushman' is the archetypal Australian despite Australia being a primarily urban country. I think this sort of thing is fascinating, which is the primary reason I enjoyed the course so much. I can imagine that people who didn't find this as interesting as I did would rate the course lower. Other important areas in the course were the White Australia Policy (both immigration and Aboriginal aspects), the ANZAC legend, Australia as a 'workingman's paradise' and a 'social laboratory', and how Australian identity is constructed and imagined today. I found all of this stuff really interesting as well.

Overall: 9/10. This course gave me a new perspective on Australian history and on modern Australia which has made me more appreciative of the country, which is probably a good thing. I'm now more interested in studying Australian history and am strongly considering changing my major from ANHS to HSTY in order to do it at honours level. Really good course, strongly recommended. (Shame they're cancelling it and replacing it with an entirely new course as of next year.)

Man. I agree completely. Best course for me this semester. It has completely made me want to do Australian history throughout my degree.

 

[Triangulum]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

ARNE1001 Archaeology of the Near East
Lecturer: Dr Dawn Cropper

Ease: 7.5/10. Utterly shitty and pickily marked assignment in which you had to find an artefact and write about what it tells us about the society that created it. (And that was all the help we were given.) Had nothing to do with the rest of the course, which was basically historical rather than focused on material culture. 2000-word essay, which was pretty standard except for the overly vague and broad questions (there is NO WAY you can satisfactorily discuss 'trade' in New Kingdom Egypt in 2000 words, and that was one of the more specific topics available). There was a ton of material in the lectures and not much guidance as to what would be in the exam, but as it turned out you only needed to know a few areas to attempt it successfully. The content itself was very basic and simple (except for some difficult tute readings), but there was a lot of it.

Lecturer: 8/10. Dawn was clear and concise in her lecturing, which I found a positive after bad experiences with ramblers this semester, Diarmuid. She had a very familiar style, particularly in the tutes but also in the lectures, which I think a lot of people appreciated but I found vaguely patronising. This was probably because I already thought of her as patronising because of her continual and annoying focus on essay-writing skills and referencing. She spent a full lecture and a full tute on these, time which we could have used actually learning course material, but instead we were subjected to basic stuff like topic sentences and 'why is referencing important?' and 'what is plagiarism?' and introductions, bodies and conclusions (seriously, that's year 7 material). If our writing was really that terrible - and no other lecturer I've had has ever found their juniors' writing so bad that it justified spending hours of teaching time on - couldn't she have just directed people to the Write Site or run a voluntary session, rather than wasting the time of people who are fine with writing essays and making them feel patronised? </rant> Apart from that, I thought Dawn was fine.

Interest: 7/10. I expected this course to focus on archaeology - the study of material culture - but particularly in the later part it turned into a very potted narrative history of the ancient Near East. I've always seen the point of archaeology as revealing how ordinary people lived, especially in the Near East where the literary record is dominated by the elite, and we studied this sort of thing at first - I found the section on the early Levantine neolithic fascinating - but after about the Mesopotamian Early Dynastic we got caught up in a very sparse and shallow coverage of the narrative, without any reference to the archaeological record except the occasional victory stele or something. If I had just wanted to learn the political history, I would have signed up for a course that covered it in depth: people did this course for the archaeology, and there was really precious little of it. So in the second half of the course, I spent most of my time in the lectures half-asleep (didn't help that they were scheduled at 10am, which means I had to get up at 6.30am and I'm really not a morning person), and most of my time in the tutes wishing for death to take me away.

Overall: 6.5/10. I was disappointed with this course - it was nothing like it was advertised. Friends tell me that the equivalent classical archaeology course, ARCL1001, was much better, focusing on building a knowledge of the archaeology, rather than the narrative. I would have appreciated more linkage to the practical archaeological knowledge we obtained in first semester and to the process of finding meaning from material culture, rather than a dull historical overview.

 

[stazi]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

MKTG3112 - New Products Marketing
Lecturer: Michael Paton

Ease: 9/10. You can get 25/25 for tute participation just by handing in homework each week. Then you get another 2 bonus marks for participating in a research study. The final exam was also quite simple and 1/5th multiple choice. I am currently on 58/60, and should have about 90% overall.

Lecturer: 3/10. Really nice guy. That's about all the positives of his lecturing style. I have no idea why, but for some reason he insisted on summarising the textbook chapters himself, making his own powerpoints from these summaries, and then reading them during the lecture. So, what we got was a summarised version of the text.

Interest: 3/10 - The above made it very uninteresting, especially as the text was the most boring and dry marketing text I have ever read. A course on new product marketing can be very interesting: i've taken one in the US on exchange, however, this was horribly boring. The only redeeming feature was some of the tutorial homework exercises.

Overall: 3/10 - The sad thing is that this course is very useful, as badly as it was taught. I think this is mostly owing to the fact that Michael Paton has no real interest in the subject area (he is teaching as a replacement for the regular lecturer). The good news is that there will be a new lecturer taking this course next sem.

 

[Rorix]

Re: Subject Reviews - UPDATED WITH .PDF on first post

FINC3013 - Mergers and Acquisitions

Ease - 3/10
Probably not that hard if you do the work, but that's abit unlikely considering how fucking boring it is.

Material is pretty easy, although I agree its on the dull side.

Lecturers - 1/10
Shit. Didn't go after Mid-Semester. Was told by my friends this was a wise decision.

Joel has a lot of great info and is very approachable, although i'll be the first to admit he is a tad monotone. Juan well..I will choose not to comment.