Uni Stuff > University of New South Wales
UNSW Course Reviews
jamonwindeyer:
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3145 - Real Time Instrumentation
Contact Hours: 2 hours lecture, 1 hour tutorial, 3 hours lab
Assumed Knowledge: First year Mathematics, ELEC2141, and a fundamental programming course (COMP1511 or similar)
Assessment: 10% lab checkpoints, 10% lab exam, 10% midsem, 10% assignment, 60% final exam
Lecture Recordings? No
Notes/Materials Available: -
Textbook: None prescribed, anything on Real-Time systems could be useful. Your textbook for Control Systems could come in handy.
Lecturer(s): Dr Branislav Hredzak
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 2/5
Overall Rating: 5/5
Your Mark/Grade: 92 HD
Comments: This is a good course to take at the same time as Control Systems, because much of the content overlaps. I found the two courses nice to do in tandem because they expanded and played off each other - Made things easier to remember for me.
The course is essentially in two halves - An analytical section focusing on the mathematics behind certain control systems, and then a programming section on how you actually code using a real-time kernel. The two don't overlap in any meaningful way, and the programming section is far more useful and interesting than the analytical section. The analytical section is not that difficult - The programming section is extremely easy if you are a decent programmer.
Overall though, an interesting and enjoyable course. Branislav teaches it quite well - His style is always quiet but methodical, I've never gotten to the end of a segment of info and gone, "Wait, wtf did that mean." He knows his stuff, enjoyed his lecturing more here than in ELEC1111. The labs are fun, the exams are not difficult if you put a bit of work in. Overall, really good third year elective!! ;D
jamonwindeyer:
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3105 - Electrical Energy
Contact Hours: 3 hours lecture, 1 hour tutorial, 3 hours lab
Assumed Knowledge: ELEC2134, ELEC3115 (particularly this second one is important)
Assessment: 20% lab checkpoints, 2% online quizzes, 10% midsem, 8% assignment, 60% final exam
Lecture Recordings? Yes
Notes/Materials Available: -
Textbook: None prescribed, a variety could come in handy as the topics do cover a fair few different disciplines of Elec
Lecturer(s): Dr Rukmi Dutta
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 4/5
Overall Rating: 2/5
Your Mark/Grade: 88 HD
Comments: Another semester, another course with Rukmi - Read any of my reviews above this one to get my opinions. She has still not ever done a full worked example in any of her lectures. Her explanations are, okay - But prepare for lots of work to make them actually relate to any realistic problem. Tutorials also handled by Rukmi, and she doesn't do worked examples there either.
The content is interesting, I'll give it that. It's really fascinating to explore how our motors and generators actually operate, even exploring things like solar cells and thermal engines. It's cool - It's just taught in a really boring way. The labs are really good, though the instructional videos for it are laughably bad. Just give them a chance.
This course normally has a huge fail rate - The quizzes and labs are fine, but the exams and assignment are brutal. However, someone must have been upset with so many people needing to repeat up above, because our final exam was the easiest exam for the course in years and years. So that was lucky.
Not a highlight in the program, that's for sure :(
jamonwindeyer:
Subject Code/Name: ELEC3114 - Control Systems
Contact Hours: 3 hours lecture, 3 hours lab, 1 hour tutorial
Assumed Knowledge: ELEC2134, and second year mathematics
Assessment: 4% quizzes, 12% labs, 30% midsem, 54% final exam
Lecture Recordings? Yes
Notes/Materials Available: Hendra provides a really great set of online video material, which is excellent
Textbook: N. S. Nise, Control Systems Engineering, John Wiley & Sons, 6th or 7th Edition, but they provide essential excerpts if necessary
Lecturer(s): Dr Hendra Nurdin
Year & Semester of completion: 2017/2
Difficulty: 5/5
Overall Rating: 3/5
Your Mark/Grade: 77 DN
Comments: Control is probably the hardest course I've taken so far, but luckily I was warned how tough it was going in - Hopefully you are now as well. The content is really quite interesting, and Hendra teaches it decently well. Like Rukmi, some full worked examples on paper in front of us, and not just pointing at already derived results in sequence on a slide, would make things so much better. But anyway, he does a good job explaining things for the most part provided you are willing to work to fill in the connections to problems a wee bit.
Tutorials in this course are amazing, if you get Arash (not that Hendra is bad I just didn't have him). He re-explains the theory as he does a single problem covering everything from the lecture that week - I had the tutorial right after the lecture, and my god did it help. There's a heap of extra problems given for later revision too.
Labs were the let down for me in this course. There weren't enough demos, the demos we did have were not very good at all, and the links to our content were awkward at best and just non-existent at worst. Just a slog to me - If the labs were better I'd probably have a way better opinion of the course.
Quizzes are fine, but tough. Big questions and the slightest mistake gives you zero, but they aren't worth much. Midsem and exam are tough but they have to be for a course like this - I didn't study anywhere near enough for our final though, it was tougher than the last few years ::)
It's a really tough course, but if you know that going in, it is manageable. Just grit your teeth, put up with the shitty labs, and get a heap of marks in the midsem because it is almost always easier ;D
Mechonics:
Subject Code/Name: DATA1001 - Intro to Data Science and Decisions
Contact Hours: A 2 hour lecture every Monday, and 2x one hour labs every week
Assumed Knowledge: No formal prerequisites. But you will actually die if you don't know advanced statistics including things like Baye's Theorem, lots of probability theory, monte carlo methods etc.
Assessment: 3x 15% assessments and a 55% final exam.
Lecture Recordings? Yes
Notes/Materials Available: Lecture slides will be available on moodle. No other specific material that will help with the content.
Textbook: N/A
Lecturer(s): Three different lecturers for the three different parts (Business, Computing and Maths)
Year & Semester of completion: 2017, sem 2
Difficulty: 4/5
Overall Rating: 1/5
Your Mark/Grade: 72
Comments:
Not a very well designed course at all. Firstly, let's sort out the data science part. This course is not real data science, it is basically business intelligence and data analytics. Real data science involves machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, which was not at all even mentioned in any aspect of the course. It was more related to SQL, business analytics and statistics etc. The ideal real data science course would have discussed ground-breaking advancements in AI such as deep learning, convolutional neural networks (and other types of neural networks), general AI, etc. Also, the mathematics section of the course had the cohort up in arms. The mathematics lecturer had a PhD in statistics and the content was extremely difficult, and definitely not suitable for this level - I would even argue that it would be at a masters level.
The 3x 15% assessments were pretty easy, I ended up with like 90+ in that, but then the finals were brutal (partially because I didn't put much effort into that, but also because of the statistics part of the course being extremely difficult and unsuitable) - I'd hope they'll improve on this after all the criticism received.
Overall, do not do this course if you don't need to (e.g. as a gen ed or elective). It is not worth it.
Mechonics:
Subject Code/Name: ECON1101 - Microeconomics 1
Contact Hours: 3 (2 hr lecture, 1 hr lab)
Assumed Knowledge: None, but high school economics would help a lot.
Assessment: 20% free marks from an online game called Playconomics (which you have to buy for like $30), 2x 15% short answer exams, 50% multiple choice finals.
Lecture Recordings? Yea
Notes/Materials Available: Will be provided with playconomics when you purchase it.
Textbook: All playconomics!
Lecturer(s): Alberto Motta
Year & Semester of completion: 2017, Sem 1
Difficulty: 4/5 for me, 2-3/5 for literally everyone else
Overall Rating: 3
Your Mark/Grade: 73
Comments: Very important if you're studying economics or commerce or anything of that sort in the Business School. For me it was just a course which needed to be completed, despite being irrelevant to my degree. Please take this review with a grain of salt, I'm sure you'll fly through it if you're passionate about economics or even if you try a little bit (which I didn't really).
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