ATAR Notes: Forum

Uni Stuff => Faculties => Commerce => Topic started by: Inside Out on January 20, 2017, 10:32:41 am

Title: difficulty: commerce at melbourne or monash
Post by: Inside Out on January 20, 2017, 10:32:41 am
is commerce harder at melbourne or monash?
have heard people at monash complaining about the difficulty but i also did a second year finance subject at melbourne as breadth and only scraped a 68 with some decent effort.
Title: Re: difficulty: commerce at melbourne or monash
Post by: spectroscopy on January 20, 2017, 08:32:11 pm
is commerce harder at melbourne or monash?
have heard people at monash complaining about the difficulty but i also did a second year finance subject at melbourne as breadth and only scraped a 68 with some decent effort.
hmm, depends what areas of commerce and things but they are pretty similiar. i cant comment too much about monash as i go to melbourne, but for finance and accounting melbourne is very well respected world-wide, particularly in asia.  it reached a world ranking of 8th in 2014 above u chicago which is a very very good school for finance. ive always found the academics to be quite good.

i dont wanna diverge too much from your original question which asks which b.comm is more difficult and my initial response is that "they are the same" but after reflecting on personal anecdotal experience between the two i do think the course at melbourne is a bit harder. I've legitimately seen the coursework and practice exams that some of my good mates who do commerce at monash do and i really think that melbournes content (at least in terms of the exam materials) are harder. one big example is melbournes qm1 vs monash's first year stats subject.  I looked at the shit i was doing in qm1 which involved mega 2 page long proofs compared to what my monash friends were doing which was just basic calculations and legitimately considered transferring (LOL i did not like qm1). at monash though you can go a lot deeper into topics, for example if you simply love 1 area of study and want to just dive into that you probably have a bit more space to do that at monash as melbourne has breadth requirements + compulsory subjects and tends to teach things differently. i feel like at melbourne there is a very heavy focus on underlying concepts and proofs and that sort of thing, and things are taught quite academically. very often ive been in situations where we aren't really given anything, but to answer an exam question we just have to think about the shit we learned and underlying concepts and try to find a way to implement a solution for that particular question. and you also get wayy too many "show that x" questions. whereas the stuff from monash that i've seen is alot more practical and for real world use. they give the students lots of formulas and strategies on how to approach things and basically give you the tools you need to go into the workforce and smash things out. if you look at it from a barebones perspective, a second year finance major from monash would be much much more equipped to do an investment banking internship than a melbourne second year finance major (whose probably just done business finance at that point), so if you want that sort of real life skills monash is good. thats not to say melbourne grads and students dont to well at internships - they do quite well and they are heavily recruited for a reason. they often learn things really quickly and understand how things work at the core which helps with the pace of picking things up + in general the prevalence of case comps and people self studying makes them able to compete just fine with anyone. but the melbourne coursework as opposed to the monash coursework is alot more theoretical and mathematical/scientific across all disciplines from finance to marketing. again, this is a really small difference. monash students can be EXCELLENT academics and destroy all parts of commerce (shoutout truetears). but i feel like, just looking at lectures and exams, melbourne is a bit more academically oriented and monash is a bit more job/skills oriented.

keep in mind this is just my 2 cents and my perspective. i havent done any subjects at monash but i am pretty familiar with the stuff my mates do and learn. i know how much more they had already learnt in class when it came to case competitions and how much less their knowledge was of why certain things happen certain ways (particularly when talking about mathematical stuff to non-business stats majors)