UNSW Subject Reviews. (6 Viewers)

[smik11]

Mgmt1001

wtf is this shit. So boring and completely useless.

 

[steffanie1]

a

 

[Riachain]

Ooh, my first review! Thanks for reminding me to write my review.


MGMT1001 (Managing Organisations & People)

Ease: 7/10. It's easy to learn the content. But I didn't give this too high marks because the assignments can't be done with ease. The first assignment screws everyone over. The second assignment is much better, but still involves a hefty amount of research for you to get a decent grade. Oh, and I also didn't give too high marks because the theory behind the content isn't easy to learn. Theory can go fuck itself. Read below to read what I mean by this.

Content: 5/10. Listen, the stuff is common sense. Covers topics like how managers should treat their employees, how they should pick 'em, etc. Common sense, pretty easy stuff. But the reason why I'm giving this such a low mark is because this course uses theoretical bullshit to try and explain these theories. I don't know about you, but I hate using theory to prove something that should be common sense. It's like saying, "This is common sense, but because we're all retards, we'll use theories to try to explain why everyone knows about this." Fuck you, theorists. Fuck you.

Lecturer(s): Bernard Gan --> 8/10. In his lectures, he tries getting everyone involved, which is a plus for any lecturer. On top of that, he's funny and he gives a break halfway through his lectures. He explains the content using simple words and applies the content to real life, easy-to-understand situations. In other words, he's a brilliant lecturer, and I really loved going to his lectures. The downside is that he's a little bit difficult to understand because of his accent. Also, since his lectures don't completely cover the topics that we're supposed to go over, if you want a good mark, you're going to have to go through the textbook. Hugh Bainbridge --> 4/10. Boring. Nice guy, but so boring. Ended up skipping his lectures. While he covers more of each topic than the other lecturer does, I still wouldn't bother going to his lectures.

Tutor(s): Graeme Taylor --> 8/10. He's kind of boring, but he does go over the content pretty well, and he does try his best to help you with any questions that you have. He gives pretty detailed instructions for the assessments, which, as you might soon find out, not every tutor does. Wish that he would tell us the specific spot collection dates though. I really don't have the time to be doing the spot collections every week. That, and I can't be bothered with that crap.

Overall: 6.5/10. This content is shit and useless in my opinion, but it's not overwhelmingly difficult or anything like that. So just get through it and thank everything out there that you'll never have to do such a shit course again.


FINS1613 (Business Finance)

Ease: 3/10. They say that you don't need prior knowledge to do this course. I say, bullshit. You do. On top of that, regardless of what prior knowledge you have, you'll still need to work your butt off to be able to get decent marks in this course. And you'll also need to memorize every inch of the textbook if you want to be prepared for all the quizzes in this course. And you'll need to memorize all of the formulas too. In other words, FML and FYL, this course is not easy to get through, period.

Content: 4/10. The content is actually quite interesting. But this gets a low rating because it is, honestly and truly, a mindfuckery on your brain and soul. The theories make sense. The formulas don't. They're all complicated crap. And memorizing all of these formulas just makes me want to rate this even lower.

Lecturer(s): Mark Humphery-Jenner --> 2/10. Props for knowing his content like the back of his hand and for letting me retake a quiz because my alarm clock decided to die on me. However, he's the most antisocial lecturer I've ever had. Doesn't try to get anyone involved, just rattles on and on and on and on. Asked him a question once, and I swear, he glared at me and gave a one word reply, and then stormed off. The fuck. Also, so boring that I fell asleep in his first lecture. Needless to say, after three lectures, I never went again. Kyung-Hwan --> Didn't go to any of his lectures, since I decided to skip every single FINS1613 lecture after the first three, but from what I heard, he's heaps better than the first lecturer.

Tutor(s): Amy Kwan --> 7/10. She knows her stuff. While she does teach pretty damn well, she always rushes through the entire tutorial, so it's rather difficult to learn from her. Also, one negative point about her is that if you ask her for help, she'll just tell you to do more questions. I'm sorry, but what I need is actual help, not a list of questions that I have to do at home that will most likely further confuse me instead of helping me understand the content. Oh, and also, another negative is that she won't write out the full calculations or the full formulas. I think that she should, just because there's a bazillion formulas out there and I'm pretty sure that none of us can remember shit.

Overall: 2/10. Amy Kwan basically gave this course two marks. Otherwise I would've marked this entire damn course as a 0/10. Most likely going to fail this subject. I can't be bothered to give a damn anymore. This entire course needs to burn in the fiery pits of hell.


ECON1101 (Microeconomics)

Ease: 7.5/10. It isn't difficult to get a good mark in this course. Just make sure that you read the textbook and understand all of the concepts, because they build on top of one another. It does get slightly more difficult as the course progresses, but it isn't overwhelmingly difficult or anything like that. As long as you keep up with your readings, you should be able to do fairly well in both of the tests and the final exam.

Content: 7.5/10. Not too difficult, not too easy. Everything builds nicely on top of one another. Since 95% of this course is based on theory, it can be a little bit difficult to grasp, but I wouldn't say that it's ridiculously difficult to learn the content.

Lecturer(s): Diane Enahoro --> 8.5/10. One of my favorite lecturers this semester, hands down! She cracks jokes, gets everyone involved, and actually draws graphs on the screen to help explain the content to us. The only downside is that she's a tad bit boring sometimes. I've fallen asleep in her lectures before, but that's usually because I was sleep-deprived that day. If you get enough sleep, you should find yourself wide awake throughout her lecture, because she's bloody brilliant.

Tutor(s): Strangely enough, I can't remember my tutor's name. But, well, she's from Hong Kong and she's a brilliant tutor. She gets a 9.5/10 for me. She explains everything in a simple way, making the content easy to understand, and always goes through the lecture's content in great detail. She also uses graphs and examples from the textbook to help explain the content to us. She's easy to get along with and, in general, is just plain brilliant. You can miss the entire lecture and go to her tutorial and you'll be perfectly fine.

Overall: 8/10. Best subject this semester for me, hurrah! Not too difficult, not too easy. Awesome lecturer, awesome tutor. Other than the content being a little mind-boggling, I really have no other complaints with this course.


ARTS1811 (International Relations: Continuity and Change)

Ease: 7/10. It is fairly easy to pass this course. You only have one test and a research essay. The test is an open book test, and you have until the last day of the semester to finish the research essay. Not difficult to pass at all. However, if you want to do well in this subject, you should have a thorough knowledge of both current and past events. You should also have a basic understanding of Economics, since International Relations does cover some basic concepts of Economics.

Content: 5.5/10. I found the content extremely dry and boring. Kept sleeping in all of my lectures, so in the end, I decided to skip 'em. I don't know about you, but I absolutely hate theory, and this course is chock full of it, so I pretty much hated most of the content that this course covered. There were some interesting topics though. Also, like I said in the above paragraph, if you don't know a lot of history or what events are happening now, you'll find it difficult to understand the topics that the course covers, like I did.

Lecturer(s): William Clapton --> 6/10. Nice guy, likes to occasionally crack jokes and ask his students questions, but he's very boring. Kept falling asleep in his lectures. The tone of his voice never changes and he uses complicated words to explain the content. Elizabeth Thurbon --> 5/10. Nice woman, teaches some interesting topics, but again, she just uses complicated words to explain the content, which makes me fall asleep in her lectures.

Tutor(s): Stephen McGuinness --> 9.5/10. I just don't give away 10s, so the highest I'll ever give is 9.5/10. He is bloody amazing. His tutorials are filled with debates and jokes and fun. He explains the content in an easy-to-understand way, using simple English, which is brilliant. He's also willing to take the time outside of tutorials to meet up with you and help you with anything or even just to give you general advice. Heck, for our test, he even gave us a cheat sheet! Amazing tutor, so glad that I ended up having him as my tutor.

Overall: 5.5/10. I took this course believing that I would enjoy it, but honestly, I found the entire course boring and dry. It totally turned me off from pursuing International Relations as my major for my Arts degree. (I'm doing Commerce/Arts.) The only thing that made my day with this course was my tutor and his bloody amazing tutorials.

 

[4025808]

The shit thing with FINS1613 is the lack of student support and contact, that is, no pass classes, no forum, which is pretty bad imo :/

 

[4025808]

Guess I'll write my review now.

ACTL1001 (Actuarial Studies and Commerce)

Ease: 7/10. Not too easy, as the subject itself requires a bit of thought. It tended to focus more on theory and understanding, as opposed to the calculations that are normally done in a 1st year course. A lot of parts are missing in the course that could be covered at better ease. What's more is that the lecturer doesn't go through the mathematics section of the actuarial lecture slides, meaning that we'd be kinda screwed over for the finals. Nevertheless, it's better than having all calculations, in which some of them can be hard.

Content: 7-8/10. The content, as I said above, consists of a more theoretical approach to actuarial studies, including the context of the whole field itself. It is pretty interesting and thankfully as a result, the subject isn't dry. Thus I tended to enjoy this subject more than I would have expected. Calculations can be tricky because the lecturer likes to try and troll us hard.

Lecturer(s): Brian Chu; 8-9/10. I found him really entertaining; he seems to be quite passionate about what he is teaching, and that's good. He did really motivate me to try and understand the stuff regarding the actuarial and finance sector, which was good. Although once, when I tried to ask him a question regarding an actuarial calculation, he could not explain it to me. Note that Brian HATES maths, so I guess my attempt was a lil... shit?

Tutor(s): 6/10 -> I had Victor Chan, and he was very quiet. He did his job by going through the questions and explaining them, but imo, I don't think he did enough to encourage discussion in the class and motivate students to do well.

Overall: 8/10. The course could be better imo, but then again, it is Brian's 2nd year of teaching 1st year ACTL. I did like the use of fb for communication and discussion of ideas relating to the assessment tasks, work and all that though.

ARTS2451 (Intermediate Chinese A -> non background speakers)

Ease: 5/10. A step up from intermediate Chinese A. You have to actually work in order to do well in this subject, and from what I can see atm, a lot of students in my class aren't doing too well in the course. Not only that, we have to do classical Chinese, in which the words and stuff are structured similar to Shakespeare, but in Chinese (ofc). The final exam is a killer as well =_=

Content: 6/10 -> We have to learn more characters, new structures, and classical chinese phrases that we have to remember. The classical Chinese section is pretty useless, as we just memorize phrases, recall them in the exam and forget them after. Seriously what the hell =_= Then the final exam tests us on stuff that we never even learned in the textbook, which is pretty unfair (although I'll admit that it needs to be difficult to a degree).

Lecturer(s): Lu Jia -> 8/10; she was good at explaining the context of a particular topic that we were going through; she tended to give her experiences, which was good. Then she also introduced to us the structures required to be used, which was quite necessary imo, especially if you want to do advanced chinese. I remember today that the whole lecture wanted her to be the tutor for the class. Zheng Yi -> 2/10; For the cultural component, noone really understands wtf is going on in the lecture, and I don't understand her either. In the two tests for the cultural component, everyone cheated, and she didn't seem to give a shit at all.

Tutor(s): Xiaoli Sang -> 6/10. Pretty mediocre tutor, it's probs why we wanted Lu Jia as our tutor instead of her. Although good thing was that she managed to let me go through the final exam and other marks for free. Plus she gave me 6 extra marks, made my score for this subject a DN this semester (Y)

Overall: 5/10. It's not that great; everything is pretty disorganized and over the place, including that, the teaching for this subject isn't very good either as a whole.


FINS1613 (Business Finance)

Ease: 5/10. Even as an actuarial student, I actually found the course quite hard :/ Even normal students could possibly find it hard. Multiple choice exams are bitch; last quiz consisted of 4 questions worth a total of 10 marks, get one question wrong and you're down to 7.5 already. Then whats worse is that the next quiz has 3 questions, and if you get one Q wrong, you're down to 6.6667/10 =_= The lack of student support in general also brings it down; no pass classes, lack of student contact, etc.

Content: 3/10. It's so boring, my goodness. Most of the content learned is so dry, and the way it is taught ain't too good either. A lot of it requires memorizing formulas and applying them, which is shit (I hate memorizing formulas =_=)

Lecturer(s): Mark Humphery-Jenner -> 2/10. Can explain stuff well, is so fucking boring that I just started skipping lectures. Not sure about Kyung-Hwan, but people told me he's better. Apparently Kyung-Hwan made the 4th test crazily difficult because he got mad at a lecture when everyone was talking. Then he made the finals crazy as fuck to punish everyone once again, which is just stupid imo.

Tutor(s): Peter Andersen -> 9/10. He's a really good tutor because he explains his stuff well and has a good sense of humour. TBH he is a bit of a troll sometimes, as evident in the 1st quiz where he went like '20 SECONDS LEFT' on the 10 minute mark. I remember he was asking all of his FINS1613, 2624 and 3616 students for two oktoberfest tickets through his zmail; seemed so desperate and hilarious at the same time.

Overall: 4/10. I didn't like the course, didn't feel much interest in it, but that's my personal opinion. Not only that, there was a lack of willingness to help other people's mistakes; the staff cbfed trying to help other people because they are so lazy, which is a horrible contrast compared to ACTL1001, where Brian helps you as much as possible (Y).


MATH1251 (Mathematics for Actuarial Studies and Finance 1B)

Ease: 5/10. A lot harder than MATH1151 this time; where it is a lot more conceptual. This is particularly true with vector spaces, where the concepts related to it are mindfuck as hell. Eigenvalues and eigenvalues aren't easy either. =_=

Content: 6/10. The content was decent, it was difficult too and not as great as I thought it would have been.

Lecturer(s): Hendrik Grundling -> 4/10. Knows his stuff but he speaks with a very monotone voice, which was kinda discouraging. As a result, I started skipping calculus lectures as well. :/ Brian Jefferies -> 1/10. Knows his stuff but no passion to teach the subject what so ever. Does not control the lecture if the crowd gets too loud. Boring as hell imo =_=

Tutor(s): Algebra - Boris (don't know his last name): 9/10. He explained the tute questions quite well, went through the harder ones in particular. Calculus - Norman Wildberger -> 7/10. He tends to go through the easy questions, and is a bit slow. He should be going through the harder questions instead, because others can understand stuff better that way.

Overall: 6/10. Not as good as MATH1151 at all imo. Also, no discussion forum also meant that me and a bunch of friends had to open up an fb group dedicated to asking MATH1251 related questions.

 

[Riachain]

The shit thing with FINS1613 is the lack of student support and contact, that is, no pass classes, no forum, which is pretty bad imo :/

Yup. For a course like this, there should definitely be quite a bit of support. PASS classes and all that. But there's none. Which makes this course even more crappy. Never taking it again.

 

[Shadowdude]

Not like you can take it again anyway.

 

[4025808]

Not like you can take it again anyway.

If you fail and if you're doing a finance major, then you'd have to. Otherwise, choose another flexi-core.

 

[Shadowdude]

yeah but i'm not sure they'd do that badly

 

[Riachain]

yeah but i'm not sure they'd do that badly

If I get less than 7.5/10 for the quiz next Wednesday, I'm failing the course. I'm doing that badly at it. Fuck this course, I'm doing another flexi-core. >__>;

 

[Shadowdude]

oh come on, i got like 5/10s in all my quizzes and ended up with a 73

 

[4025808]

oh come on, i got like 5/10s in all my quizzes and ended up with a 73

How was the final for you though? :O

 

[Shadowdude]

i probably got around 65/100 or so

 

[Riachain]

i probably got around 65/100 or so

Well then, just wish me luck. I'm studying like heck for the final quiz so that I can pass this course.

 

[4025808]

i probably got around 65/100 or so

Then by your words I'm assuming that FINS1613 scales up then.... :O

 

[Shadowdude]

Well then, just wish me luck. I'm studying like heck for the final quiz so that I can pass this course.

good luck for it - i just crammed the course in the end, anyways

Then by your words I'm assuming that FINS1613 scales up then.... :O

might be

 

[wantingtoknow]

Then by your words I'm assuming that FINS1613 scales up then.... :O

I think my fins tutor explained that with fins subjects (or just fins2624, I forgot), they distribute marks according to your rank in your cohort. so like, they'd give the top 5% hd, next 20% dn etc and then they might fail the bottom 2%. so as long as you don't come last, you should be fine

 

[4025808]

I think my fins tutor explained that with fins subjects (or just fins2624, I forgot), they distribute marks according to your rank in your cohort. so like, they'd give the top 5% hd, next 20% dn etc and then they might fail the bottom 2%. so as long as you don't come last, you should be fine

So after all, it'll be like HSC scaling all over again, but even worse. FFS =_=

 

[slyhunter]

Had a feeling FINS1613 would get a beating because of today

 

[BoredDude]

FINS1613 wasn't that bad... Probably guessed around 30% of the test though... But that's me lol.