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Author Topic: UNSW Course Reviews  (Read 288633 times)  Share 

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kierisuizahn

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #120 on: June 01, 2019, 08:36:29 pm »
+6
Subject Code/Name: COMP3821 - Extended Algorithms and Programming Techniques

Contact Hours: 1x 2hr + 1hr Lecture, 1x 1hr Lecture (extended class)

Assumed Knowledge:
Prerequisites:
  • COMP2521 - Many data structures employed in the course, analysis of algorithms

Assessment:
  • 20% Assignments - Three assignments, weighted equally; last assignment included a bonus question which contributed marks to make up for lost marks in assignments one and two; written in TeX or a similar format and submitted online; involve presenting algorithms and explaining why they work, given time and space complexity constraints, as well as some explanations of course content generally; quite difficult, but incredibly fun; not to be left to last minute as they require a lot of thinking
  • 40% Midterm Exam - Midterm split into two parts, one for both COMP3121 and COMP3821, and the second for COMP3821 only (testing extended content); similar to the assignments, but generally with solutions involving changing algorithms slightly instead of coming up with your own from scratch; some more conceptually difficult questions in the extended test requiring enough mathematical maturity to prove some results; preparation required
  • 40% Final Exam - Very similar to the midterm, but focusing on the content in the second half of the course, and requiring more thought; an extra question for those in COMP3821 on the extended topics; very good idea to look over past exams for the course to get an idea of the kind of difficulty you will face

Lecture Recordings? Yes - screen and voice recorded, as well as some videos of the lecture on YouTube as the blackboard was used regularly (especially in the extended lecture)

Notes/Materials Available: All lecture slides posted online, and past final exams available. Example midterm was supplied, and a list of problem solving questions was posted in preparation for both the midterm and final.

Textbook: Note: I don't use textbooks and can't comment on their usefulness. One of
  • [Prescribed] Introduction to algorithms, (the third edition preferably), by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein, The MIT Press
  • [Prescribed] Algorithms design by Kleinberg and Tardos, Pearson

Lecturer(s): A/Prof. Aleks Ignjatovic

Year & Semester of completion: 2018 S1

Difficulty: 4/5

Overall Rating: 5/5

Your Mark/Grade: 99 HD

Comments: So far, my absolute favourite COMP course. The course focuses on problem solving, and a lot of it is trying to give you the tools to apply various algorithms to different problems, and adjusting them where needed. The extended content goes into randomised algorithms, which was my favourite topic of the course. It is certainly a difficult course, but is very very fun, and I would 100% recommend it. I only attended a few lectures, but Aleks explains the concepts well, and is very helpful if you attend the consultations. If you're on the fence about doing it, take a look at the questions in the final exams, and see if they're the kind of question you like.

jazz519

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #121 on: June 02, 2019, 08:06:01 pm »
+5
Subject Code/Name: CLIM1001 - Introduction to Climate Change

Contact Hours: Online course (there is a group report though so some groups like mine preferred to meet in person)

Assumed Knowledge: None

Assessment:  30% Online Quizzes (Three 10% online quizzes with 40 questions and unlimited time), 10% discussion board participation, 15% group peer review (3 tasks, 5% each - very easy because its just your members in your group saying if you did work or not so if you do your fair share you will get a free 15%), 45% individual component (15% writing a report on a topic and getting it marked by three other peers, 15% quality of feedback you gave to other people you marked, 15% final revised report graded by course staff)

Lecture Recordings?  No lectures all material is in videos and text on Moodle

Notes/Materials Available:  All required materials are on Moodle

Textbook: None

Lecturer(s): No lecturer

Year & Trimester of completion: 2018 Sem 1

Difficulty: 1.5

Overall Rating:  4

Your Mark/Grade: 91

Comments:
In terms of a Gen Ed the subject is fairly light in terms of the work load as the assignments are not too lengthy.

One assignment is 3 main quizzes of 10% each that are not too difficult as it tests material you have to read on Moodle and that you can also use while doing the quiz since its online, at home and has unlimited time.

The discussion board participation can be a bit boring at times as the questions people ask can be repetitive however if you make a post like once every week you should get the marks for this part. Also, the posts were largely informal so you didn't have to do in-text referencing each time which makes this part of the course fairly fast and easy to do

The group tasks aspect is an easy way to get marks because although you write a report as a group you never actually get graded on the quality of the report, but rather just your participation in writing the report, which is judged by your group members. So if you do your part then you should get the maximum 15% mark for this

The individual component was worth 45% and is similar to the group report. There are three components to this: 15% initial report that is marked by 3 of your peers at random, 15% mark that you receive for people rating the feedback you gave to others in the previous marking component, 15% final revised report marked by a staff member. In this assignment, you essentially are given a topic and news article that you need to critically analyse in terms of the scientific evidence and other biases that the person may have had when writing their article.  The report is around 1500 words in length.

I found the subject overall to be fairly interesting in terms of describing all the aspects associated with climate change and the psychology of climate change as well which is linked to things like laws and public opinion. The assignments are fairly straight forward, however, as there is a peer review marking section for the individual component there is a chance that your mark may not be perfect as some students might mark harder on you than others. If you are someone who is fairly good at writing critical reports or essays similar to English but where you analyse something then this will be a good course for you. An added bonus is it doesn't have a final exam so you save time with that

« Last Edit: June 02, 2019, 08:10:14 pm by jazz519 »
HSC 2016: 99.7 ATAR

UNSW: Advanced Science: Major Chemistry & Minor Mathematics

Recipient of Late Stephen Robjohns Science Scholarship
and AAA Scholarship at UNSW

jazz519

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #122 on: June 02, 2019, 08:31:47 pm »
+5
Subject Code/Name: PHYS1160 - Introduction to Astronomy

Contact Hours: Online course

Assumed Knowledge: None (but some knowledge of basic physics is helpful)

Assessment: 26% discussion group participation (something like 16% on forum participation, 10% assesses quality of your actual posts, by assessing 2 posts that you made on the forum that you submit in a section called 'Best Discussion Posts'), 32% interactive tutorials (small quizzes that check your understanding of the content), 18% essay on a topic that you choose from a list, 24% final test (online and at home, but is timed)

Lecture Recordings? No lectures

Notes/Materials Available: All required material is on Moodle

Textbook: No textbook

Year & Trimester of completion: 2018 Sem 1

Difficulty: 2

Overall Rating:  4.5

Your Mark/Grade: 93

Comments:
Many people do this course as a good wam booster and it cane used as that as I think more than 50% of people ended up getting a HD. However, you do have to keep up to date and treat it as a normal course for this type of mark. The content is not very hard but because there are marks associated with fortnightly forum discussion participation you do have to a little bit of work each week. The discussion posts consist of two parts: asking questions on the content you just read in that section (but you should try to post questions that are a little more in depth than just repeat the content in the lesson) and answering the questions other people post. For the answering part however, its like doing a short answer post each time because you do have to provide references to the information you used. However, answering 2-3 posts per week in a decent detail and asking 2-3 questions should get you these participation marks. One extra thing to consider is that you get a bonus mark for posting or answering a question in the first week of the topic each time.

There is a best discussion posts assignment you have to submit, where you choose two of the posts you made in the semester and submit them as being your best posts. If you spend your time doing the posts throughout the semester with a decent enough detail you should do relatively well in this section

The 18% essay is probably the most annoying part of the course but because they provide you with a topic and potential things you could write about it isn't that bad, but will take a little bit of time to write.

The final test is 24% and consists of a multiple choice quiz that you do at home. One tip though for this is to search the question on google as I found some of the questions in the test where actually online already

Overall, this course is interesting if you like learning about science topics (but without the maths aspect of it, that can make science difficult for some people). It is a good course to increase wam but also one that you can easily take too easy and end up getting a poor mark if you don't put in consistent effort as explained above
HSC 2016: 99.7 ATAR

UNSW: Advanced Science: Major Chemistry & Minor Mathematics

Recipient of Late Stephen Robjohns Science Scholarship
and AAA Scholarship at UNSW

Caleb Campion

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #123 on: August 05, 2019, 12:24:31 pm »
+6
Code: [Select]
Subject Code/Name:
LAWS1052 - Introducing Law and Justice

Contact Hours:
4 class hours per week (2 lots of 2 Hour classes) + a 1 Hour Research Class

Assumed Knowledge:
N/A

Assessment: 
10% Court Report  (essay on court observations)
30% Case Note (Analysis on the Case + outcomes, ratio decedendi  etc)
20% Class Participation
30% Final Exam
10% Research Component Exam

Lecture Recordings? 
Class attendance is compulsory (pretty sure around 80% otherwise you fail)

Notes/Materials Available
Teacher may give you sheets each lesson, completely depends on teacher, you definitely only need the textbook.

Textbook:
Law and Justice in Australia - Foundations of the Legal System (Prue Vines)

Lecturer(s):
I had Prue Vines

Year & Trimester of completion:
Term 1, 2019.

Difficulty:
3/5.

Overall Rating: 
2-2.5/5
Your Mark/Grade:
HD - 86

Comments:
What makes this first course in Law so difficult is that you know everyone in the course is intelligent and highly capable of doing well, but at the same time you don’t know what the standard is. This course really just is a way to steady yourself and will take a while to get use to how Class works, the thinking required, and how good is good enough to get the marks you’re after. The content itself is hefty, and bores most people, but that’s just the nature of the first course in Law, and you just have to get through it. I found it bearable knowing that the teachers aren’t looking for you to remember dates, but rather concepts and ideas and the general landscape of the history. It gets much better in the last two weeks when you do intentional torts (assault, battery, false imprisonment) and is your first taster to what real law courses are like.

The sucky thing about the course is the huuugge amount of assessments you have. And now that there are trimesters, they really don’t have anything to do with the content you’ll be studying at the time they’re assigned to you.

Number one tip - just focus on analysis.

The real kicker is that you’ll study all the history and concepts for almost the entire course but it is only for one third of the exam - the essay.

Exam is 3 sections each 20 marks: An essay, a statutory interpretation question, and an intentional torts problem questions. I gave 40 minutes to each question in the two hour exam (time management is key), but used 10 minutes of each 40 minutes to plan out my response.

Overall, the research component is annoying and feels like a waste of time but is probably helpful later on, and the content is a bit boring and you really are treading through unchartered waters with this course initially, but it’s just what you would expect of a foundations course for a course as big as Law, and the term 2 course ‘Torts’ is sooooooo much better! You can do it.

katie,rinos

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #124 on: August 14, 2019, 06:08:11 pm »
+5
Subject Code/Name: Materials and Structures of Music 4



Contact Hours: 1 1/2 hr lecture, 1 1/2 jazz studio, 1 1/2 hr aural tute



Assumed Knowledge: M&S 1-3



Assessment:  Composition (20%), Aural Analysis (10%), Aural test (5%), Auralia progress (5%), Harmony/analysis test (20%), Jazz harmony test (20%), Sight-singing test (5%), Music lit test (15%)

The harmony component of the course (Harmony test/Jazz test and composition) must be passed to pass the course.



Lecture Recordings?  No :(



Notes/Materials Available:  Content and practise analyses were put on moodle. 



Textbook: The Musician's Guide to Theory and Analysis, same textbook as M&S1-3, however I hardly used it this year.



Lecturer(s): Lecturer: John Peterson, Tutor (aural tute): Harrisson Collins, Tutor (jazz studio): Paul Cutlan



Year & Trimester of completion: 2019,2



Difficulty: 3.5-4/5



Overall Rating:  4/5

Your Mark/Grade: 66 CR



Comments:
I really enjoyed both last terms M&S and this one, especially compared to their 1st year courses. However, I’m still really happy that this was the last theory unit. I also thought there was a lot of assessments for the trimester, especially towards the end of the term.

Lectures:
During the first half of the term, we went through fugue writing and workshopped ideas for our 16-18 bar fugue composition due at the end of wk 5. Our lecturer was able to see what we were doing and help us during some of this time (and also by email). After, this was due we mainly spent time analysing both classical and pop pieces (and learning how to analyse 9th,11th and 13th chords). Our test at the end of the term, included 3 different analyses, 1 classical and 2 pop. We went through and we were given 3 possible classical pieces and class and 1 was chosen for the test. We were also given the first 8 bars of two pop songs and had to analyses 16 bars of both in the test. I mainly enjoyed these lectures, however sometimes they seemed to drag on or Peterson would ask people to answer questions about chords.

Tutes:
Our aural tute mainly started by going through both melodic dictation and sight singing, and then moved to looking at pieces on our listening list. We would listen to parts of the pieces while looking at the historical/significant aspects of the piece which prepared us really well for the listening test. In our listening test we were given a 2min excerpt of a piece and needed to identify aspects such as the composer, title, movement, date, and significance.
For our aural analysis, we had to analyse a 6-minute jazz piece using a table format. Our aural test was similar to the auralia exercises we were expected to do at home.

Studio:
Our studio went over beginner jazz theory and was really interesting because I went into it not knowing much about jazz. Cutlan was good at trying to explain the concepts clearly and gave lots of exercises to do in class. He also tried to include student participation by having us come to the front and write our answers on the board. We had homework exercises each week but nobody ever did them, so we used to go over it at the start of each lesson. Our test was based on what we had covered in the studio classes.   
« Last Edit: September 06, 2019, 07:41:19 pm by katie,rinos »
Class of 2017 (Year 12): Advanced English, General Maths, Legal Studies, Music 1, Ancient History, History Extension, Hospitality
2018-2022: B Music/B Education (Secondary) [UNSW]

katie,rinos

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #125 on: August 15, 2019, 12:14:40 pm »
+4
Subject Code/Name: EDST1108-Indigenous Perspectives in Education



Contact Hours: 2hr lecture, 1hr tute per week, compulsory walk on country excursion in wk 7



Assumed Knowledge: None

Assessment:  500 word Teacher ‘standpoint’ statement (45%), 5-minute video + 1500 word film justification on support teaching and learning (55%) All assessments must be passed to pass the course.



Lecture Recordings?  Yes, but had 80% attendance at lectures.



Notes/Materials Available: Not much-the education society hold assessment sessions and posted slides and reading list on moodle.



Textbook: Phillips, J. & Lampert, J. (2012). Introductory Indigenous studies in education (2nd Ed.). However, this is available through the library, you don’t need to buy this. It was only really helpful for the 1st assessment.

Lecturer(s): Lecturer & tutor: Dr Kevin Lowe



Year & Trimester of completion: 2019,2



Difficulty: 3.5/5



Overall Rating:  1.5/5

Your Mark/Grade: 85 HD



Comments:
I was already told by some of my friends that this was a bad course, so I came with low expectations. But this has definitely been my least favourite course so far. It didn’t help that our lectures were 6-8pm on a Monday night. Once our lecturer saw that some people would leave after marking their name off the roll, he would hand it out towards 7:30, which meant that we’d have to stay back even later to mark our attendance.

Most weeks we’d have guest lecturers come in to talk about different issues. However, most of the lectures seemed repetitive and tried to drive through the same main points which got really boring after a while. I think the content was important but it wasn’t taught in a way that was engaging and made me receptive of it. The tutes were mainly just group work going through the readings or questions that were asked of us. They were mostly based of the readings, but most people hadn’t done them so if you had, you spent half the time trying to explain it to the rest of the group. The best part of the course was the compulsory walk-on country excursion at La Perouse. I originally thought it would be terrible but I did this with some of my friends and it was really interesting walking around and hearing what the Aboriginal guides had to say about the area.

The assignments themselves were really frustrating. It’s a high fail rate course and because I had heard that, I was really anxious starting the first assignment. Even though they tried to explain it to us, we were still not too sure what we were meant to do. They needed to be worded in a particular way so not to offend anyone. The bibliography was included in the word count for both assessments, so it took me ages to cut down on the word count for my essays (and still sound coherent). The 2nd assignment was in 2 different parts and the 5-minute video was very annoying.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2019, 10:04:33 am by katie,rinos »
Class of 2017 (Year 12): Advanced English, General Maths, Legal Studies, Music 1, Ancient History, History Extension, Hospitality
2018-2022: B Music/B Education (Secondary) [UNSW]

Jack89

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #126 on: August 20, 2019, 04:48:49 pm »
+5
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3105 - Electrical Energy

Contact Hours:  4 hours lectures (2x2 hour blocks), 3 hours lab (5 labs in the term), 1-2 hour tutorial

Assumed Knowledge: ELEC2134 (the part on power analysis), ELEC3115

Assessment:  5% weekly quizzes, 10% assignment, 15% midsem, 20% labs, 50% final.

Lecture Recordings?  Yes

Notes/Materials Available: There is a course summary and past paper on the ELSOC website. The lecturer provides a few past papers.

Textbook: I used 2 textbooks for reference to clarify any difficult concepts. "Electrical Machinery Fundamentals" and "Principles of Electric Machines and Power Electronics"

Lecturer(s): Rukmi Dutta

Year & Trimester of completion: 2019/2

Difficulty: 4/5

Overall Rating:  4/5

Comments:
This course is all about electrical power, with an emphasis on non-ideal motors, generators and transformers. There is a lot of circuit analysis (know your AC circuit analysis well!) but it's interesting to see how power engineers actually design and use these circuit analysis techniques to determine currents/voltages, etc. in a power system.

The first part of the course is about solar, wind and hydroelectric power, and the calculations of power and efficiency of these systems. Then it shifts into 3-phase power and transformers. Unlike in ELEC2134, the transformers are non-ideal, and an equivalent circuit has to be used instead. Then it shifts into motors and generators, with a focus on DC machines, induction machines and synchronous machines. There are different equivalent circuits for each type of machine and special procedures that must be memorized to find different quantities like the circuit parameters, power, losses, torque, etc. This is where the difficulty of the course mainly lies. There is quite a lot to remember, with a fair few large formulas too.

The labs are really good and quite enjoyable and interesting. The consolidate a lot of concepts. The quizzes and midsem are fine. The assignment is quite challenging with 2 difficult questions to solve. The final exam was fair, although there were a couple of derivation questions. Overall, it was an interesting course but sometimes it got just a bit tedious.
« Last Edit: August 20, 2019, 04:53:51 pm by Jack89 »

Jack89

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #127 on: August 28, 2019, 08:18:02 am »
+5
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3114 - Control Systems

Contact Hours:  4 hours lectures (2x2 hours), 2 hour tutorials, 2 hour labs

Assumed Knowledge: ELEC2134 (the Laplace transforms section), MATH2099 (The linear algebra section), other techniques from 1st and 2nd year math courses.

Assessment:  10% weekly online quizzes, 20% labs, 30% midsem, 40% final, 5% optional bonus project.

Lecture Recordings?  Yes

Notes/Materials Available:  There is a course summary on ELSOC. Past papers are provided by the lecturer.

Textbook: I used "Control Systems Engineering", Author Norman S. Nise. This came in handy for the more difficult concepts.

Lecturer(s): Arash Khatamianfar

Year & Trimester of completion: 2/2019

Difficulty: 5/5

Overall Rating:  5/5 (more like infinty/5)

Comments:
So far this has been one of the best and most interesting courses I've taken, tied with ELEC2133 and PHYS1131/PHYS1231. The lecturer was amazing and taught the content very well. He changed the course slightly and shifted the focus a little bit from previous years. The major topics were mathematical modelling in both time and frequency domains, state space design, PID controllers, steady state error, root locus methods, state variable feedback design (with LQR design) and frequency response techniques.

What I loved about this course was how well Arash taught it, he always went into depth to explain everything and backed up his teaching with plenty of worked examples. He always linked what we were learning to real life industry and also to his own PhD which involved robotic control systems. That's what makes him one the best lecturers.

Arash also completely redesigned the labs and made them link to the course much better than the old labs from previous years, as mentioned in another post for control systems. The labs consolidated a lot of the material in a practical way. They take time though, make sure to complete the prelabs and work quickly during the lab because they are quite long. However there are catch up labs in case you don't finish everything.

The weekly quizzes are fine, but the exams can be challenging. Arash writes very long exams. Almost no one finished the midsem and the final was also very time consuming. But for this difficult course, that's to be expected.

Overall, a fantastic course - I'll definitely be taking some control electives in 4th year.

Jack89

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #128 on: August 28, 2019, 08:44:10 am »
+5
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3145 - Real Time Instrumentation

Contact Hours:  2/3 hour lectures, 3 hour labs, 1 hour tutorials

Assumed Knowledge: , ELEC2134 (the Laplace transform section), and to a small extent ELEC3104 and ELEC2142 and MATH2099 (the linear algebra part)

Assessment:  10% lab checkpoints, 15% midsem, 15% lab exam, 60% final.

Lecture Recordings?  Yes

Notes/Materials Available:  Not much, possibly a real-time engineering textbook would come in handy

Textbook: None

Lecturer(s): Branislav Hredzak

Year & Trimester of completion: 2/2019

Difficulty: 2/5

Overall Rating:  4/5

Comments:
I actually took this elective after reading a previous review of it by Jamon, and it's well worth it. I would describe this course as being a sort of bridge between control systems and DSP, with a big focus on implementing controllers in the discrete-time domain. Mostly the content overlaps with control systems (state space methods, PID controllers, Laplace transforms) and DSP (z-transforms, discrete-time equations and filters).

There is a small, separate (3 weeks) part of the course which involves actually learning how to program in real-time and learning about how to implement a real-time system.

The content is not difficult, however one somewhat challenging part would be solving differential equations using the Runge-Kutta methods. The labs are quite enjoyable and not difficult (just a bit of basic C-programming is required). The midsem was fine but the final exam was quite difficult (e.g. in one question we actually had to solve a 4th order Runge Kutta using 2 iterations ). It probably didn't help that the final was held from 5:45 - 8:00pm.

Overall this is actually a very useful and interesting elective and I'd recommend taking it.

blasonduo

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #129 on: September 05, 2019, 08:27:48 pm »
+5
Subject Code/Name: EDST2044 - Motivation in Learning and Teaching

Contact Hours: 2x 1-hour lecture and a 1-hour tutorial each week.

Assumed Knowledge: 2 first year EDST courses are required.

Assessment:
Personal Reflection (40%) - 1500 words
Annotated Lesson Plans (60%) - 2500 words (NOT including lesson plans, resources and
references)
4x online tasks (300-500 words each) (HURDLE)
All assessments must be passed to pass the course.

Lecture Recordings?  Yes (but weirdly still needed to attend :/ )

Notes/Materials Available: Previous DN and HD assignments were provided to allow a benchmark on what we were expected. Additional readings were also provided.

Textbook: None, but plenty of readings available (some required, some optional)

Lecturer(s): Dr Marianne Mansour and Dr Tracy Durksen

Year & Semester of completion: 2019 Term 2

Difficulty: 2.7/5

Overall Rating:  3.3/5

Your Mark/Grade: 78 DN

Comments:

I'm honestly surprised this course is an elective because there were many times where the content presented would've been extremely valuable for highschool classrooms. Motivation is one of the underlying aspects of learning, and the course had many different activities students could undertake to improve motivation, including the underlying theories behind them. The content is pretty interesting!

The first assessment was really straight forward and pretty easy, mainly reflecting on how your past experiences utilised motivational theories discussed in the course, and how to use them in the future, easy marks and the workload here wasn't too big.

However, there was a huge contrast when the second assessment came around. It was extremely useful for the future, but it took forever to complete. The assessment overall took me 3500 words, with 2 lesson plans, explanations on those lesson plans, and analysis of them. The number of other articles you had to read before tackling the assignment took forever. This assessment, although extremely long, is extremely useful for when we enter the classroom environment.

The lectures, so far in my education journey have been my favourite (luckily). It as if they were practising their teachings! The lectures were engaging and relevant. The only downside is the fact that as with all EDST courses, the lectures didn't need to be 2 hours (however for this course, it was the closest to actually achieving this)
2018: UNSW B science (physics)/B education

Kicking myself into gear

HSC Physics Topics 1 & 2 Exam!

RuiAce

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #130 on: September 06, 2019, 06:48:57 pm »
+7
Subject Code/Name: MATH3821 - Statistical Modelling and Computing

Contact Hours: 3 hours lecture in total, 1 hour lab, 1 hour tutorial

Assumed Knowledge: MATH2831/MATH2931. It then gets crammed very quickly in the very first lecture as a refresher.

Assessment:
- 2 x 10% assignments
- 20% mid-term (laboratory test)
- 60% final exam

Lecture Recordings?  Yes

Notes/Materials Available:
Slides are comprehensive but arguably dense...
Tutorial and laboratory questions uploaded, but solutions were only uploaded to the ones not covered in class. No real other resource.

Textbook: None, but this one was recommended as a side resource.

Lecturer(s): Tom Stindl

Year & Trimester of completion: 19t2

Difficulty: 4/5

Overall Rating:  3/5 3.5/5 - Experience made better following paper inspection

Your Mark/Grade: 94 96 HD

Comments:
This course is compulsory for all students pursuing a statistics major. (There is no higher counterpart.) It's essentially the course aimed at developing and training real-world application of statistics. The R software is used.

I think everyone felt this way. The lectures were far too packed. A bit too much content was present in this course and getting lost following the lecture was an unusually more common thing here. This change was implemented last year, but apparently there was more advice on how to deal with it. It's a huge trek trying to study for it otherwise.

Perhaps, a bit too much breadth given the time? I think he did try to put depth in, but it was a bit foreshadowed. Regardless, I wouldn't imagine a thing called keeping up with this course is possible unless somehow you've seen it all before.

Biggest drain was in the second assignment honestly. I appreciated the lecturer's genuine marking a lot, but mixing in both a report and the presentation was a bit torturous. Still though, there definitely were improvements - I was very thankful to find that Q&A panel and peer review was taken out. (I really shouldn't say this as a statistics student, but I wasn't interested in hearing about various investigations - I just wanted to do the task!)

Also unlike the first assignment, groups are randomly selected by the lecturer for the second. Some of my mates got put with bad teammates, which made things hard. I got lucky here.

Strong emphasis as in a prior review though - this course is NOT 100% computing. Although both assignments and the midterm revolved heavily around computing, the finals is still a 60% weighted exam, of which only roughly 10% was computing based. It's a math course, so expect some level of theory involved. Computing is just a means to an end when it comes to modelling.

Final exam questions are niche. Doing the tutorials helps a lot, because about half of our questions were based around them. But also you need to understand the content physically to be able to do a large portion of the rest of the exam.

It's just that proofs weren't really assessed much until the finals. The only proof question in assignment 1 was straightforward.

Also: Although MATH3871 is definitely not assumed knowledge, I found that doing it beforehand made the Bayesian half of this course FAR more dealable. Whilst some of my peers were forced to learn Bayesian altogether, I was like "oh yeah this is just 3871 gone nuts". Could be advice for you? Keep in mind though Bayesian is now offered in T3, whilst this is a T2 course.
« Last Edit: September 27, 2019, 06:55:57 am by RuiAce »

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #131 on: September 06, 2019, 07:14:31 pm »
+8
Subject Code/Name: COMP3821 - Extended Algorithms and Programming Techniques

Contact Hours: 2 x 2hr lectures. (No tutes)

Assumed Knowledge: Only COMP2521. (For the extended version, at least 65 in COMP2521 is required.)

Assessment: For our year:
- 2 assignments, individual weighting unknown but combined to 20% total.
- 40% midterm w/ 1 page cheat sheet
- 40% finals w/ 1 page cheat sheet
Supposedly there were bonus marks for active contributions on piazza, but I have no idea how that worked out.

Lecture Recordings?  Yes

Notes/Materials Available
Same lecture slides as has always been used for this course. The support staff that marked some of our solutions shared a reasonably large bank of past papers for the midterms/finals and also a piazza forum.

Textbook:
- Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein - Introduction to algorithms
- Kleinberg and Tardos - Algorithms design
Used the latter to help me learn NPC - that was useful at least.

Lecturer(s): Dr. Abdallah Saffidine

Year & Trimester of completion: 19t2

Difficulty: 4/5

Overall Rating: 1.5/5

Your Mark/Grade: 94 HD

Comments:
This course is the extended version of COMP3121, which is now core to computer science majors. (Basically the higher version.)

To be honest, despite somehow coming out alright, I was very disappointed by this course. I can never complain about 20% raw scaling, but after the bomb that was the mid-term (completely changed format, somewhat unrealistically spiked difficulty, pseudocode in the exam and also harsher marking criteria) this course became a huge trauma for a while. It was a huge struggle convincing myself to not drop this course in favour of the ordinary version later on.

Pseudocode is new to this course it seems. Not my cup of coffee, but not impossible to bear with for an assignment.

I do suspect that the course being hyped by not just like one person but several of my peers had an impact on this. I came into this course expecting a lot of things to be different.

Amazingly I found myself a bit rubbish at dynamic programming. Two tips about it: 1. don't expect good complexity all the time and 2. avoid greedy! I kept sidetracking into trying to find a greedy solution at time and had to remind myself "no that's not the way to do it".

NP-Completeness was new to the exam. It can occasionally get a bit challenging - make sure to think about those problems!

Wasn't the worst course I've done at the university though. At the very least the course is properly split into two halves. The midterm only examined the first half of the course, whilst the finals examined only the second half.
« Last Edit: May 17, 2020, 04:48:09 pm by RuiAce »

jazz519

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #132 on: September 06, 2019, 07:52:02 pm »
+5
Subject Code/Name: CHEM2021 - Organic Chemistry: Mechanisms and Biomolecules

Contact Hours:  4 hr of lectures a week (4 x 1 hour lectures), 4 hr lab

Assumed Knowledge: First Year Chem Courses (CHEM1031 and CHEM1041) and CHEM2041

Assessment:  TOO MANY assignments
- 5 lab practicals (worth 30% in total, so 6% each in which you have a mark out of 30 - 6 marks for lab book, 9 marks for core skills, 15 marks for lab report)
- Mid semester exam (17%)
- Assignment on Topic 2 (Carbonyl Chemistry) (3%)
- Assignment on Topic 3 (Aromatic Chemistry) (3%)
- In class quiz / exam on Topic 4 (Biologically important organic compounds) (3%)
- Final Exam (120 marks and 44%)

Lecture Recordings?  Yes, but some lecturers write stuff on the board. I didn't go to lectures (as I self learnt a lot from the textbook) but if you are someone who is going to probably struggle in the course a very good idea to attend them

Notes/Materials Available: Moodle slides are fairly good for overall content and but the issue is sometimes mechanisms are not in the lecture slides for the harder reactions, which is very annoying as the harder reactions can be very difficult to understand the first time and you don't know what to search up, so you end up having to use like youtube videos and wasting time figuring out which one links to your concept.

A good YouTube channel I found really helpful was Leah4sci

Textbook: Organic Chemistry 7th Edition by Paula Bruice (VERY VERY VERY useful. This textbook is amazing and very well written and has lots more examples to understand things than you would directly from the lecture slides)

Lecturer(s): Professor Martina Stenzel, Dr Vinh Nyugen, Dr Albert Fahrenbach

Year & Trimester of completion: 2019 trimester 2

Difficulty: 5

Overall Rating:  4

Your Mark/Grade: 95 HD (for any future student that cares this was the mark for 1st ranking)

Comments:
This course is very difficult if you are not someone who enjoys or is good at organic chemistry. If you struggled in the organic chemistry section in chemistry 1B, then you are going to struggle in this course most likely. The road map they provide you in Chemistry 1B in first year is no longer present in 2nd year organic chemistry. You have to memorise that whole table and every mechanism off by heart x 4, because there are 4 topics in 2nd year organic. This course does have a lot of memorising (roughly 100-200 reactions and around 50-80 mechanisms), so it is something you can't just do last minute. The best way I found to study was I made notes from the textbook early on (finished by like week 8 in the term), and then I spent the remainder weeks just memorising the reactions and doing the practice problems provided by the lecturers and additional questions I did from the textbook. A lot of people at the end of the course thought they failed the final exam so make sure you study hard for it.

The lab component is also very different from first year courses. In this course you have 5 practicals, which usually last for 2 weeks long. There is also 5 lab reports you have to write for each experiment which end up meaning you have to write something like 1.5-2k words every fortnight. This is not fun at the beginning because the way you write the lab reports in this course will be in a scientific format you probably haven't learnt at school or in first year, so don't worry too much if you don't do well in the first practical. I myself got like 25/30 in the first practical but learnt from the comments given and all labs after that I was scoring 28-29/30.

The mid semester exam was nice in that a lot of the questions they used were similar to the practice questions given with a few different ones, so make sure you know how to do all the questions in that set provided and you should do fairly well. There are also three other assignments. Two of them are take home where you answer around 30 marks of exam like questions and then submit them for marking and the last one is a short quiz in class. Most people did okay in the carbonyl one, but marks in the aromatic section were almost a fail as the average was around 16/30 (one tip here make sure you write the full mechanisms for the ortho, para and meta, even if it only subs on one of those positions as this is where a lot of marks were lost by people).

Overall the course was quite difficult, but I enjoyed it because I found the course interesting. I wouldn't recommend this course to someone as an elective type of thing that did first year chem, because it may kill your wam, but it is compulsory for chemistry majors and chemical engineering people so make sure you come prepared for this class, as it is probably the most difficult of the 2nd year chemistry courses in my opinion
« Last Edit: February 15, 2020, 06:15:05 pm by jazz519 »
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jazz519

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #133 on: September 06, 2019, 10:15:06 pm »
+6
Subject Code/Name: MATH2018 - Engineering Mathematics 2D

Contact Hours: No in person contact, but there is 3-5 hours of online videos / lectures to watch each week

Assumed Knowledge: MATH1A and MATH1B

Assessment: 
- Class Quiz 1 (15%)
- Class Quiz 2 (15%)
- Online MAPLE weekly quizzes (10%)
- Final Exam (60%)

Lecture Recordings? There isn't any in person lectures, but yes there is lecture videos on youtube

Notes/Materials Available: Moodle materials are very thorough and what they expect you to know

Textbook: No textbook I am aware of

Lecturer(s): Dr Anna Cai was course coordinator but there was a different person in the videos (can't remember his name) but nevertheless very good lecturer

Year & Trimester of completion: 2019 trimester 2

Difficulty: 2

Overall Rating:  4.5

Your Mark/Grade: 96 HD

Comments:
The course is actually pretty easy in my opinion, which is one of the reasons I chose it for one of my level 2 courses in my math minor. A lot of the content is similar to MATH 1B in some sections so if you did good in first year maths this course should be a breeze.

There's no in person lecturers as well so that is nice and all the videos for the whole term are available from day 1, so you can go at your own pace and go ahead if you need to. I found this really helpful because when I knew I would have more exams or assignments in a certain week, I could watch the lecture videos in advance before the week begun so it reduced my workload for that week.

There is 1 maple quiz you do every week which has about 5-6 questions. The questions are very similar to the problems in the lecturers and it is very similar to how the first year math courses are structured where you can have unlimited attempts, so these marks are very easy to obtain

The first class test was an in class 35 mark quiz for about 40-50 minutes that covered topics 1-3. The questions were quite similar to the tutorial problems and also similar to the sample class tests given, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get above 30 if you do the work before. One down side of these class tests is there is no calculator rule so you might make silly mistakes and lose marks on that

The second class test was different to the first class test because it was on MAPLE. But this isn't a maple test like first year. It's more like you do questions similar in setting to the first class test, but you just enter your final answer into MAPLE. The good thing about this test was that the actual test was very similar to the sample test given so if you just do that like 5-6 times you will do well. However, a bad thing is if you get unlucky with MAPLE syntax errors or accidentally do one small mistake in your calculation you lose all the marks for the question, which is a lot considering most questions were 2 marks and the test was out of 16 but worth 15%.

The subject is really transparent as I said before and this is also evident in the final exam. They provided us with like 15 exam papers from the past 8 or so years to practice that had worked solutions. This was really helpful in preparation for the exam, as the question styles were quite similar, so if you spend the time doing the past papers the final exam shouldn't really be too much of a shock

Overall quite a good course and one I would recommend to people who enjoy math and want to do it is an elective or part of a math minor if it is not compulsory in your program





« Last Edit: September 06, 2019, 10:30:38 pm by jazz519 »
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UNSW: Advanced Science: Major Chemistry & Minor Mathematics

Recipient of Late Stephen Robjohns Science Scholarship
and AAA Scholarship at UNSW

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Re: UNSW Course Reviews
« Reply #134 on: September 06, 2019, 10:46:26 pm »
+6
Subject Code/Name: MATH2089 - Numerical Methods & Statistics

Contact Hours: 5 hr of lecture, 2 hr of tutorials

Assumed Knowledge: MATH1A and MATH1B

Assessment: 
The marks in this course are treated like if the statistics and numerical methods are separate subjects. So if you get 80% in the stats component and 90% in the numerical methods component, you get 80 + 90 divided by 2 as your final mark so 85%.

- MATLAB Intro quizzes (5%)
- Stats 3 x online quizzes (20% released every 3 weeks or so)
- Stats Mid Sem (20%)
- Numerical Methods 3 x online quizzes (20% released every 3 weeks or so)
- Numerical methods Mid sem (20%)
- Final Exam (60% for each component)

Lecture Recordings? Yes but statistics lecturer always writes on board so you can't see it. The numerical methods lecturer uses the document camera so you can watch those lectures from home.

Notes/Materials Available: Moodle materials should be good enough

Textbook: There is one in the course outline but I didn't use it so can't comment on its usefulness

Lecturer(s): Dr Quoc and Dr Gery Geenens

Year & Trimester of completion: 2019 trimester 2 (quite important because trimester 1 is run by a different school in the university so they test different stuff)

Difficulty: 4

Overall Rating:  2

Your Mark/Grade: 88 HD

Comments:
This course honestly speaking I didn't really like it. The content I found fairly boring and the support from the staff running the subject wasn't that good. Many times students would post comments on the forum asking for help and the message would either be ignored or they get replied to a week after. I chose this course for one of my math minor units and I would rather have not chosen it and did some other course. So I would recommend not doing this course if you don't have to.

The assessments are not insanely hard as the in term tests it is not too difficult to get above 36+/40, but for the final they did provide us with exam papers, but there was no solutions to some of them and no solutions at all for the statistics component which made studying for the final difficult. The final was sort of similar to practice tests but there was some different stuff

Overall, the course is not overly hard, but I feel like it could have been run better with more help from the staff when students ask questions on the forum
HSC 2016: 99.7 ATAR

UNSW: Advanced Science: Major Chemistry & Minor Mathematics

Recipient of Late Stephen Robjohns Science Scholarship
and AAA Scholarship at UNSW