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UNSW Course Reviews
MLov:
Subject Code/Name: MATH2931 - Higher Linear Models
Contact Hours: 3 x 1 hour lectures, 1 hour tutorial-laboratory (alternating every week)
Assumed Knowledge:
- Prerequisite: MATH2901 or MATH2801(DN)
- Not prerequisite: MATH2601 or MATH2501 but treated as assumed knowledge throughout the course
Assessment:
- 3 x group assessments, each worth 10%
- Final exam weighted 70%
Lecture Recordings? yes
Notes/Materials Available: N/A
Textbook: N/A
Lecturer(s): Dr. Libo Li
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 2.5/5
Overall Rating: 3/5
Your Mark/Grade: HD
Comments: This course together with MATH2901 can be used to replace ACTL2131.
The course is pretty dry. It starts off with simple linear models, and then expands to take into considerations of higher dimensions and other factors such as non-normally distributed errors and non-constant variance. More than half of the course is implementing R outputs and "understanding the philosophy" behind them.
(Prepare yourself for all kind of hypothesis testing!)
Other half of the course is proofs. The proofs are mainly linear algebra (and some vector/matrix calculus).
(Now please take a moment of silence for those who enrolled in MATH2931 without learning MATH2601/2501)
Overall the course is relaxing and not time consuming as there isn't too much content, but you can easily lose motivation. Just lay back and listen to Libo's wonderful voice :D
MLov:
Subject Code/Name: ECON1102 - Macroeconomics 1
Contact Hours: 1 x 2 hour lecture, 1 hour tutorial
Assumed Knowledge: Prerequisite: ECON1101
Assessment:
- In game quiz weighted 10%
- Class quiz weighted 10%
- Mid semester exam weighted 20%
- Final exam weighted 60%
Lecture Recordings? yes
Notes/Materials Available: Macroeconomic notes are all over the internet
Textbook: N/A
Lecturer(s): There are multiple streams, and multiple lecturers
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 1.5/5
Overall Rating: 3.5/5
Your Mark/Grade: DN
Comments: If you think this would be the same as ECON1101, you have came to the wrong place.
This course talks about the economic system from an aggregated scale and introduces how government and central bank influences our economic system. Instead of analysing the behaviour of a single agent, you will be taught how the entire population responds to events like change in price, inflation and policies under specific assumptions.
This course requires much more mathematic computations and interpretations than ECON1101. The mathematics uesd in this course are very simple (you are not expected to know why those formula works, they are further explained, in greater depth, in later courses). However, there are quite a lot formulas you need to memorise.
You need to get your head around the ripple effect: how multiple events affect each other (you are recommended to construct a network of the relationships between each event, e.g. government buy bonds -> more money supply -> higher inflation -> weaker currency wrt foreign currency -> less import -> ... ) and the beauty of equilibrium.
(Also you will know much more about what the economist are talking about on tv)
Overall, it is a really fun and relaxing course and give you a macroscopic view of our world. It is slightly drier than ECON1101 (less games, more theories) but more relevant to the real world.
Side note: they are currently building a game just like playeconomics for this course. :D
RuiAce:
Subject Code/Name: MATH2931 - Higher Linear Models
Contact Hours: 3 x 1 hour lectures, 1 hour tutorial
Assumed Knowledge: MATH2901 is a prerequisite. For this course, some elements from MATH2501/MATH2601 are implicitly assumed (although not explicitly examined).
Assessment: 3 x Assignments (10% each), finals weighted 55%.
Lecture Recordings? Yes, but you miss quite a fair bit of what's done on the blackboard.
Notes/Materials Available: As with MATH2901, Libo releases his lecture notes.
Textbook: N/A
Lecturer(s): Dr Libo Li
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 2/5
Overall Rating: 2.5/5
Your Mark/Grade: 80 DN
Comments: This course is basically the continuation of MATH2901 and essential to any statistics major student. It takes the concepts of statistical inference introduced in its predecessor and essentially seeks to introduce basic model fitting and analysis. Much of the content in this course revolves around R; you are not required to write R code but you will need to interpret given code in assignments and in the exam.
For me, this course felt significantly more dry and bland than its precursor. The first half of the course introduces all the essentials to model fitting and the concepts behind it, but it gradually turns into just grind and rote. It becomes more memorisation in the later half, and whereas the proofs are decent they start becoming very convoluted. It's more or less about how to fit a model that does whatever it does, and just what deductions you can make out of it. You also need to know the uses of various forms of measure (e.g. Mallow's Cp and the PRESS statistic for goodness of fit).
This course would've been rated a 1/5, but every course is made better by the presence of Libo and that can't be denied.
I don't regard this as a difficult mark despite getting a considerably lower mark in it than MATH2901. I just find it a lot less interesting.
It should be remarked again that linear algebra (MATH2501 OR MATH2601) is not a prerequisite for this course. Linear algebra is just an aid used for the proofs in this course. Remember that MATH2931 assumes MATH2901, WHICH assumes MATH1231/41/51, so elementary linear algebra concepts should not be foreign. Stuff like spectral decomposition, may, however, be a bit unfamiliar.
Note: The lectures for this course are combined with its ordinary counterpart MATH2831. This is due to the cohorts being appreciably smaller than that of MATH2801/MATH2901. MATH2831 students aren't expected to deal with much of the linear algebra components and have a few less things to memorise.
RuiAce:
Subject Code/Name: COMP1511 - Introduction to Programming (later renamed to Programming Fundamentals)
Contact Hours: 2 x 2 hours of lectures, 1 hour tutorial, 2 hour lab
Assumed Knowledge: Nil. But the nature of computing courses is that ANY prior programming experience is recommended.
Assessment:
- 10% allocated to milestone writeups
- 5% allocated to labs
- 30% allocated across three assignments (weighted 5%, 10%, 15%)
- Final exam weighted 35% (30% for theory, 5% for practical)
Lecture Recordings? Yes
Notes/Materials Available: The materials they provide for the lectures, tutorials and labs are all you really need. (Well, and of course assignments.) Exam skeletons provided which reduce reading time required in the actual exam room. Fairly abundant in quantity.
Textbook: As implied above, not required
Lecturer(s): Andrew Bennett (occasionally substituted in by Jashank Jeremy)
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 3/5
Overall Rating: 3.5/5
Your Mark/Grade: 82 DN
Comments:
This course is one of the new courses introduced as part of UNSW CSE's massive renovation. It is the second time it's been offered (first offering was last semester), and replaces the old course COMP1917. It is generally regarded as the more intense of the bundle for engineering students that need only 1 computing course for their degree (the alternatives being COMP1911 and ENGG1811).
This course introduces C, which is essentially one of the fundamental languages of the programming world. The focus isn't necessarily on just C syntax itself, but its applications in solving relatively simple problems. Attempting to design methods to solve these problems is generally the hard part, not necessarily the actual coding element.
Content wise, the course is brilliant. It pretty much introduces all the basics expected for an introductory course without overkilling it. Everything is introduced from scratch, which really reflects the "no assumed knowledge" statement. Math required is fairly minimal (no calculus and such for sure). Teaching staff were also very helpful and taught really well. The staff and the content itself basically make up the bulk of the rating given. The extra .5 comes out of interesting assignments (again, content wise).
The teaching staff did their best to cut down on this, which was definitely something I appreciated, but personally I just find blogs effort when I'm marked on them. So any bit of it damages it for me, but it doesn't really damage it enough to make me dislike the course. It was also nice seeing some increase in marks towards the end, regardless of the reasons behind it and how little there were.
A small remark I do want to make before talking about the cons - you can never really know if you'll like coding unless you give it a go. Some people really loved doing it (including me) and other's hated it. This is just because coding doesn't work well with many people's brains; it's a bit algorithmically intense to be fair, and hence why the difficulty rating was above 2/5. So if it's of some interest, give it a shot, and then abort it only when you actually know you really dislike it.
A surprisingly large amount of my marks seem to have fallen from style during the second half of the course. The style guide is something essential to the first course - I've seen outrageously disgusting code be written by some programmers and it just isn't legible. But the extent of its strictness felt too far in some regards (not EVERY regard), and it resulted in many marks going to waste.
As well as being uncertain of where my code was incorrect every now and then. Quite disappointingly, just one of the three assignments ended up drowning away all of my expectations for my results (the other two were really great).
So essentially, marks negatively bias my ratings (at least, when they are a cause of disappointment and not expected). But I maintain the relatively good quality of this course. Apart from a bomb thrown in the final practical exam, everything did feel quite easy for me. Any student capable enough should give this course a try.
jamonwindeyer:
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3117 - Electrical Engineering Design
Contact Hours: 2 hours lecture (though none of them went for more than an hour or so), 3 hour labs
Assumed Knowledge: ELEC3106
Assessment: 40% on proposals and reports, 30% on final presentation, 5% attendance, 25% final exam
Lecture Recordings? Yes
Notes/Materials Available: -
Textbook: Pretty much any textbook could be useful in this course depending on your project.
Lecturer(s): Dr Beena Ahmed, Dr Alex Von Brasch
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 3/5
Overall Rating: 3/5
Your Mark/Grade: 91 HD
Comments: So this is the course you take as a prerequisite for doing your Thesis in Year 4 - It's a big design project. You pick a partner, and you build a consumer product prototype. No real assistance, no restrictions.
The project itself is really difficult because, I don't care if you got 90+ scores in every electronics course so far, that doesn't teach you how to design something. You need to be able to program a microcontroller, design a PCB, do stuff that no course teaches you (and this course won't either). That's my biggest criticism of this course - It would be the chance to have industry professionals come in and teach you things you'll actually use, introduce actual industry software and methods to help with the projects. But nope, they waffle on about phases of design and let you figure out the important stuff on your own. Don't get me wrong, some of it is really good to know, but it falls so far short of the potential of a course like this.
Labs are well designed - A few really knowledgeable people are around to help you navigate issues in what is essentially free time for your projects (you need every 3 hour session, and so much more time at home, to get it right). I envy them - $50 an hour (or something) for doing mostly nothing ;) assessments are fair, a couple of reports, a presentation and attendance are the things directly related to the project - Good practice on documenting things for industry.
Then there is the Final Exam, which is based on the almost completely useless lecture content. Waffle your way through it and it shouldn't be too difficult, and it weighs nothing (compared to other exams) anyway.
If you enjoy building and designing something from scratch that is yours (who wouldn't!), and you have a good partner, this course is fine. But it had the potential to be the best course they offered and instead it's just - Meh.
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