COMP1917: Computing 1
Ease: 3/10 – This is not an easy course, goes over material fairly quickly.
Content: 8/10 - Topics I liked were binary search trees and sorting. Most difficult were undoubtedly linked list I found.
Lecturer: 9.5/10 - Alan Blair. I’ll admit that he’s funny definitely in good and fun ways. The time when I showed him my unintelligible code and replies “what is this man?” while giggling – made me laugh too. People who had Alan in the past, I'm sure you can picture this.
Interesting, I was really surprised that he has a Mathematics degree at a doctoral level from MIT!
Tutor: 9/10 – David. I liked him as our tutor, kept it really casual as possible (he’s still an undergraduate).
Overall: Solid course.
COMP1917 in semester 2 is better, purely my opinion because the course is actually taught in person by a lecturer in the school, rather than having to watch videos in the lecture theatre that was taught years ago. Another reason is that we don’t have to do any non-sense assignment tasks. Alan Blair the lecturer was a great guy as well.
Assignments we had were quite difficult, especially the second one where we’re meant to compute quad trees using various types of data structures. Prac exams were okay. Weekly lab tasks + presentation were easy marks, but just make sure that you submit it within a week. It occurred to me a couple of times where I totally forgotten about the labs, missed about 2 – 3 labs altogether? Another note is that people in CSE, both students and academics are really great people. One time I was in the CSE labs and raised my hand to a higher year student who I mistakenly thought was a consultation tutor, happily helped me anyways – was definitely a good feeling.
MATH1231: Mathematics 1B
Ease: 7/10 - Better experience than MATH1131. The Calculus part of the course is more algorithmic way of solving the problems, whereas the Algebra part focuses more on proving theorems.
Content: 8/10 (Calculus), 6/10 (Linear Algebra) - Integration, Differential Equations, Eigenvectors/Eigenvalues, and Probability/ Statistics were good topics . All other topics were mediocre, like Linear Transformations and Vector Spaces.
Lecturers: 7/10 - Chris Tisdell (Calculus): He was much better and classes were more fun in the past.
10/10 Peter Brown (Calculus, Final Lecture): Peter Brown took the final lecture of Calculus and he was great (like always).
8/10 - Daniel Chan (Algebra): Great, fast speaker and reiterate topics in a good manner. However, I think sometimes he’s a little bit too technical with some of the topics for a course like this.
Tutors: 8/10 - Geoff (Calculus): He’s alright.
5/10 - Forgot name (Algebra): Writes all over the board which makes it very confusing to follow.
Overall: 8/10 I liked MATH1231 than MATH1131, I just found it easier to follow. Maple Lab Test was easy marks, you can literally study the syntax the day before and score full marks in. Do the problem sets and you should have no problem with the class test. Practice as many past papers as you can (you know the drill). The final exam was probably one of the easiest out of all past papers, EXCEPT probability and statistics – which I found was the hardest throughout the past papers, but for other topics, its was doable.
PSYC1011: Psychology 1B
Ease and Content: 8/10. Favourite lectures were Abnormal and Perception psychology. The Animal Learning lectures were quite easy to follow if you know most conditioning topics (if you did Psych 1A in first semester). Memory and cognition was alright. Least favourite were psychobiology.
Lecturers: All lecturers were good, especially Dr Thomas Whitford – the most articulate lecturer I had so far at uni, and easily one of the best. Rick Richardson was good as well.
Tutor: 9/10 – Antonio. Good also, likes how he changes his outfit every week.
Overall 8/10: SONA research participation /SSP points were essentially free points. Also, make sure if you have the opportunity, you should complete the extra 4.5% points with 4 extra hours of the 4% and complete at least 3 hours before Week 7 – easy, did all it before Week 2 to get things done and over with. It was not the same story for the research report though, I was 11 days late and lost 22% (deduction of 2% each day - which wasn’t so bad compared to other schools and departments). For the mid-semester exam, you don’t have to read the assigned textbook to pass the exam, you just had to know the lecture material – in the past you had to, and this is the first time they made that change. The presentation was ok, but our group was lazy and lacked a proper communication medium (i.e. one did not have Facebook), so it became very confusing, and we all decided to do most of the work the day before. We got a credit for that task, so it wasn’t so bad.
Overall, it was great course.
