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UNSW Course Reviews
jamonwindeyer:
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3104 - Digital Signal Processing
Contact Hours: 3 hours lecture, 3 hours lab
Assumed Knowledge: ELEC2134 (particularly the part of the course on transform methods), as well as a variety of techniques from 1st and 2nd year maths courses
Assessment: 50% Final Exam, 10% Labs, 15% Assignment, 25% Prokect
Lecture Recordings? Yes
Notes/Materials Available: Complete online video course
Textbook: S. K. Mitra, Digital Signal Processing, McGraw-Hill, 2011. Explains stuff well, good buy if you are planning to do later courses in DSP.
Lecturer(s): Dr Vidhyasaharan Sethu
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/1
Difficulty: 4 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5/5
Your Mark/Grade: 83 DN
Comments: This is the first course in Digital Signal Processing that you can take, and it's a prereq for all the 4th year DSP courses.
This is a really, really interesting course, and if you put the work in super enjoyable! Project is fun and lets you do as much as you can handle (you can do a little bit and pass easily, or do a heap of work to try and scape out the full mark). Labs are really long but good, overall - Wish they'd do more to teach you the sorts of questions you'd get in the final though. Lecturer is good, explains stuff well, but could really do with some slides/notes to guide his explanations. Hard to know what the important stuff is sometimes - Very few lecturers can get away with just scribbling on a document camera for 2 hours and he probably isn't one of them. That said, put a bit of work in yourself and he'll give you the ins and outs nicely ;D
This is a mandatory course for Electrical Engineers, and it's a good one. Get ready for lots and lots and LOTS of coding in Matlab (it is criminal that they don't really have you do much properly with it until this point) :)
jamonwindeyer:
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3106 - Electronics
Contact Hours: 3 hours lecture, 2 hour lab, 1 hour tutorial
Assumed Knowledge: 2133 - Analogue Electronics, but that's not super essential. Circuit knowledge from 2134 is probably enough to scrape by. Also need knowledge of logic circuits from 2141.
Assessment: 10% labs, 10% lab design task, 10% quizzes, 70% final
Lecture Recordings? Yes
Notes/Materials Available: Not a whole lot, but the lecturer provides quite a lot!
Textbook: A. S. Sedra & K. C. Smith, Microelectronic Circuits. Oxford University Press, 6th ed., 2011.
Lecturer(s): Torsten Lehmann
Year & Semester of completion: 2017-1
Difficulty: 4 out of 5
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5
Your Mark/Grade: 78 DN
Comments:
This is probably one of the most interesting courses I've done in terms of what was covered - It's all about why the theoretical stuff you've learned to this point kind of goes to shit in practical applications. It's real world stuff and Torsten teaches it so well. It's the style of teaching you want - He literally just teaches with a pen and paper, and while it demands you to make sure you've done a bit of reading/know what's vaguely happening, if you do that his teaching style rewards you. Super cool.
What lets this course down, for me, is the labs. My demos weren't great, I don't think the structure of them with the reports really facilitated much additional understanding. Just felt like a slog. Plus I got buggy chips that screwed my final design task - :P
Overall, really cool course though. Challenging, but rewarding :)
RuiAce:
Subject Code/Name: MATH2621 - Higher Complex Analysis
Contact Hours: 3 x 1 hour lectures, 1 hour tutorial
Assumed Knowledge: The formal prerequisite is a mark of 70 in one of MATH1231/MATH1241/MATH1251. However, a "lecture 0" is provided as revision and is essentially sufficient as a basis for the course.
Assessment: 2 x 45 minute quizzes (each weighted 20%), final exam weighted 60%
Lecture Recordings? Yes, but in saying that you miss out on anything drawn on the blackboard
Notes/Materials Available: Extremely comprehensive lecture notes provided, accompanied with lecture slides. Quite an abundance of past quizzes and exams.
Textbook: Nil
Lecturer(s): Dr Alessandro Ottazzi, Dr Michael Cowling
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 3/5
Overall Rating: 4/5
Your Mark/Grade: 90 HD
Comments: This course serves as compulsory for two of the primary mathematics majors, and one viable choice out of two for the statistics major (the other being MATH2221). For the most part it was brilliant; everything about the maths in this course was fun. (This is also what draws students majoring in statistics to this course over MATH2221.) It is the higher counterpart of MATH2521.
This course, much like the first semester courses, is a continuation of what's been taught in MATH1231/41/51. Simply put, the first year math courses teach the algebra of complex numbers, whereas this course teaches the calculus of complex numbers. Many proofs in this course are examinable, but have the luxury in that you can figure them out on the spot, so long as you know all the basic ingredients.
The lecturers are very funny and keep you engaged decently well. In particular, Dr Michael Cowling drops hints on what might be in the exam, based off previous years. It still ended up being a bit of a bomb though with more twisted questions this year, but for the most part it is fairly relaxed. (In fact, if the final exam didn't drop the bombs, the difficulty would've only been 1.5/5)
The course really depicts how different and surprisingly beautiful the adapting of calculus to complex numbers can be. Many things that hold for real analysis are broken when taken to complex numbers, but more powerful results are derived.
Note that this course is the expansion of the former course MATH2620 (3 UoC), and was first taught in 2014.
RuiAce:
Subject Code/Name: MATH2701 - Abstract Algebra and Fundamental Analysis
Contact Hours: 3 x 1 hour lectures, 1 hour tutorial
Assumed Knowledge: The formal prerequisite is a CR in MATH1231/MATH1241/MATH1251 or enrolment in Science (Adv Maths) or Adv Science, but you really should have a bare minimum of DN in MATH1241/MATH1251 if you are considering this course.
Assessment:
- Analysis half: 5 x small assignments (each weighted 2%), can collaborate with your peers and the internet on how to do the problems. 1 take-home test
(weighted 15%), must be done alone.
- Algebra half: A mixture of 10 minute quizzes and assignments (combined weighting of 25%)
- Final exam weighted 50%
Lecture Recordings? No
Notes/Materials Available: Analysis half - Decently comprehensive lecture notes provided. Algebra half - The lecturer provides his notes, but they are hand-written and often hard to read. Notes written by a student also published but they are very brief. A few past papers provided; some more obtained through the lecturer.
Textbook: Nil
Lecturer(s): Dr Lee Zhao, Dr Jie Du
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 5/5 - This course's difficulty is well beyond any other math course in the first two years.
Overall Rating: 3.5/5
Your Mark/Grade: 88 HD
Comments: This course is generally regarded as the pure mathematics "trademark" course. It is what distinguishes this major for the rest. It forms the bridge between the mostly computational nature of first year courses, and the extent of proof in the later pure courses. As implied multiple times above, it is divided into an analysis half, and an algebra half.
Analysis is the formalisation and extension of every idea used in modern calculus, whereas 'algebra' is the exploration of various structures that build and are used in mathematics. They generally involve quite different ways of mathematical thinking, but form the two main blocks (and debatably, pathways) of a pure mathematician.
Analysis is just intense by nature, but was something that I found quite neat and challenging. It is common to just spend hours at a problem and not get anywhere, and at the same time it's always a huge excitement when you figure it out. This half encourages you to draw upon ANYTHING you've been previously exposed to, and produce neat results out of it. Some topics include the big 'O' notation, inequalities and p-adic analysis.
The structures of abstract algebra are mostly groups and fields. Group theory is used in this section but to a small extent; the course's name feels like a misnomer as it's mostly focused on geometries (including projective geometry and transformations). Unfortunately, it really didn't work well with me for several months; I only managed to figure everything out at the end after receiving a lot of help. (There may have been other factors influencing this problem.)
Given the nature of pure mathematics, a bridge between first and third year is certainly necessary and this course serves that purpose quite well. However, whilst it may be easier than what's to follow, the content you learn can be a huge shock, hence the significantly lower candidature for the course. Most people do well in this course, but it's usually because they're just that capable.
MLov:
Subject Code/Name: ACTL2102 Foundations of Actuarial Models
Contact Hours: 1 x 2 hour lectures, 1 hour tutorial
Assumed Knowledge: Prerequisite:ACTL2131 or MATH2901 and (enrolment in 3154, 3155, 3586, 3587, 3588, 3589 or 4737)
Assessment:
- Mid semester exam weighted 20%
- Group Assignment 20% (16% report + R codes, 4% reflection + peer reviews)
- Final exam weighted 60%
Lecture Recordings? Yes
Notes/Materials Available: N/A
Textbook: Ross, 'Introduction to Probability Models'
Lecturer(s): JK Woo
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 2.5/5
Overall Rating: 4.5/5
Your Mark/Grade: HD
Comments: This course is regarded as one of the easiest ACTL courrses. It does not require a lot of knowledge in finance, and as the name suggest it has a lot of statistic components. The course can be broken down into two main components, Markov Process and Time Series. However, this course does need some knowledge about computing, as you will learn how to simulate different kinds of distributions (e.g. non-homogenous poisson, exponential, normal etc.) and implement them on R.
The application of Markov process should be the hardest component of this course, it requires you to have a strong understanding about the properties of Markov process and teaches you the necessity to consider every factor in your calculations(which is hard) like all other ACTL courses.
Overall, the course will be like a pleasant break after your suffering in ACTL2131 and 2111. :D
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