USYD Subject Reviews (revived) (1 Viewer)

[Anaya R]

I know some of you younger folks said you'd start a thread at the end of Semester 1, but I thought I'd just drop in with some subjects I've already completed this year.
Remember the criteria is:
Ease: /10
Lecturer: /10
Interest: /10
Overall: /10
Feel free to add additional comments as to justify your scoring (or highlight interesting staff who teach).

 

[Anaya R]

OLET1666: Writing with LaTeX
Ease: 8/10 - sometimes the challenges were easy, but sometimes the feedback was vague
Lecturer: N/A as this was run as an online unit. The course coordinator was quite responsive though on ED
Interest: 9/10 - I enjoyed the skills and the final assignment, but it was challenging as someone with a limited coding background.
Overall: 8.5/10 - great OLE, but some parts did make it seem a bit unjustified when considering that it is a 2cp OLE. If you want to succeed, you have to pace yourself well and start on your final assignment early.

 

[Anaya R]

OLES2139: Experience (Germany)
Ease: 10/10 - the modules are self explanatory, and if you pay attention in class you'll easily ace that part.
Lecturer: 10/10 - the staff are all professional and understandable
Interest: 10/10 - plenty of opportunities to explore the city in the class context, but there is enough leeway to go exploring on your own.
Overall: 10/10
In the words of Palpatine, *do it*.
[This is a valuable opportunity, and if you have the means absolutely go for it!]

 

[its_ace21]

no can more people do this its interesting

 

[Masaken]

no can more people do this its interesting

you should do it talk about ur chem unit

OLES2139: Experience (Germany)
Ease: 10/10 - the modules are self explanatory, and if you pay attention in class you'll easily ace that part.
Lecturer: 10/10 - the staff are all professional and understandable
Interest: 10/10 - plenty of opportunities to explore the city in the class context, but there is enough leeway to go exploring on your own.
Overall: 10/10
In the words of Palpatine, *do it*.
[This is a valuable opportunity, and if you have the means absolutely go for it!]

out of curiosity, what degree are you doing? (i'm just interested + curious lol as a unsw student)

 

[its_ace21]

you should do it talk about ur chem unit

no but shout out to my linguistics teacher for making the unit survivable

 

[Anaya R]

out of curiosity, what degree are you doing? (i'm just interested + curious lol as a unsw student)

B. Education (secondary)/advanced studies (teaching maths and history)

 

[yanujw]

CLAW1001: Foundations of Business Law
Ease: 5/10
Lecturer: 7/10 (Note that the lectures are online videos)
Interest: 9/10
Overall: 7/10

The content was thoroughly interesting and the application of it is also quite practical (unlike HSC legal studies where you learn the law and discuss the issues behind it, here you apply and discuss the application of the law to given scenarios). There's a really high weighting on the final exam considering that you don't really get essay feedback throughout the semester, but it's open book, and the tutors are generally pretty generous with participation marks.

But be warned, this subject has a shitload of notetaking. My final notes for this subject had 17,800 words, which for reference is more than the total combined word count from my ECON1001, BUSS1020, BUSS1030 and OLET1601 notes.

 

[carrotsss]

MATH1971: Mathematics 1A (SSP)
Ease: 6/10 - Because we were the first cohort to take the new combined subject the difficulty was a bit all over the place. In my opinion the assignments are mostly free marks if you’re willing to put in the effort, and the webworks were completely free because of the number of attempts we got. The midsem quiz was pretty tricky especially if you don’t have good exam technique (average was ~5/10 for advanced) but the final exam was really not too bad because we had a 75% overlap with MATH1061, and the marking seems to have been pretty generous given my mark. I’m assuming over the next few years they’ll even out the difficulty a bit more though.
Lecturer: 7/10 - The lecturers were fine at teaching but they (and the coordinator) were pretty good at being understanding of our circumstances and changing the course appropriately to account for problems and that sort of thing.
Interest: 9/10 - This pretty much depends on how much you like maths. If you like maths, you’ll love this unit, but it’s pretty similar to the introductory maths content you’ll find at most unis. The SSP seminars were fun and did teach some pretty interesting stuff as well.
Overall: 8/10

If you’re taking this unit you probably have to do maths 1a anyway and so it’s more a question of choosing between MATH1061, MATH1961 and MATH1971. MATH1061 is fine if you’re not a maths major and don’t want to do more maths down the road but there is a lot of content cut from it compared to the old courses, so if you’re a maths major it’s probably worth sticking it out with advanced, even if it feels like extra difficulty for no reason. SSP isn’t really too different to advanced other than an extra seminar a week and a group presentation that you’ll do on the night before. The main benefit of SSP is having one constant class of people who also like maths through 3 tutorials/seminars a week, and so it’s a great way to make friends (and it’s how I made a lot of my best friends so far in uni).

 

[carrotsss]

INFO1110: Introduction to Programming
Ease: 7/10 - The unit’s assessments are being completely changed for this semester so my experience doesn’t apply anymore in that regard. The content seems to be mostly similar though and in my opinion it’s really not too bad, as long as you do every Ed lesson (including the challenges/practice) without chatGPT you’ll almost certainly be able to do pretty much the whole course confidently by the end of semester.
Lecturer: 5/10 - The lecturer himself was engaging, but I don’t think that they’re doing lectures anymore this sem, which honestly makes sense since I don’t really find lectures helpful for coding. In terms of unit coordination though, this course was a mess. On our assignment they spent weeks releasing test cases after it was released (effectively punishing anyone doing it early), and were still fixing fairly major issues with the specification in the week before the due date. We were given virtually no useful resources for the exam, and the exam included parts of python which we were explicitly told not to use for most of the semester, and a 3 mark question to write out 9 full test cases. The main redeeming quality was that the Ed lessons were very well planned out and made learning much easier by game-ifying it to an extent and gradually stepping you through new techniques.
Interest: 10/10 - Depends on how much you like coding, you probably won’t know before this course though so it’s a good way to find out. This course is very split, some people absolutely love it and some people absolutely hate it.
Overall: 7/10

If you’re a comp sci major or similar then this is the first coding course you’ll do and a great way to figure out if coding is actually for you, and honestly the difficulty and workload is pretty fair for us. If you’re not doing it as a core unit though INFO1110 definitely has a very high workload for a normal elective, and so I’d only really recommend it if you think you’ll end up needing the coding skills later on and you aren’t going to be forced to take any other easier more specific coding units like DATA1X02 down the road. Coding is definitely an important skill but a lot of people I know who aren’t majoring in comp sci hated every second of it, so it’s worth thinking about how much you need the unit and if you are willing to put in the effort. Still my favourite unit though

 

[its_ace21]

bios1166: Neuroscience I - communication disorders

KILL ME

 

[carrotsss]

ENGD2001: Protecting People Who Use Technology
Ease: 7/10 - This unit is a bit weird especially for people used to comp sci/engo units where there is a big spread of marks from fails to almost 100s. Virtually everyone gets a Distinction/High Distinction, but if ur aiming for higher than that like 90s that is gonna be tough because they don't give out full marks that much. The assignments are mostly really long reports which is a bit of a pain since it can take ages, and there is a fair bit of group work so that's annoying. The exam is fine though, you get to bring in notes and the questions are all fairly reasonable. The content is very easy and you can more or less get away with doing no extra study of it outside of class.
Lecturer: 7/10 - The lecturer is an amazing guy and genuinely clearly wants everyone to do well which is really nice. He's also very good at clearly setting out what you need to do to get good marks in assessments which is nice. The slideshows in the lecturers did drag on a bit though.
Interest: 4/10 - The first half of the unit is about safety and to be honest it's really really boring and sorta self-explanatory stuff. The second half is about security, and is actually a fair bit more interesting esp if you like tech since it goes into some stuff like encryption algorithms, but it still does feel like the unit excessively caters to the fact that non-engo/cs students can take it and so it doesn't really get technical enough to be too interesting, and still feels a bit fluffy.
Overall: 6/10

To be honest there aren't that many options for relatively low workload and somewhat interesting Dalyell units, so it's not a terrible option if you're interested in cyber security and that sort of stuff.

 

[carrotsss]

DATA1901: Foundations of Data Science (Advanced)
Ease: 8/10 - The content is fairly simple (helps that it is well explained), and the projects are quite easy so long as you have a good group. The advanced unit replaces the weekly quiz with relatively easy 'masterclasses' where some random researcher rambles to you for an hour and then you have to answer a few fairly simple questions about their research and how fantastic their work is, which isn't too bad as long as you don't get complacent and put effort into them. The exam is shared with non-advanced and is fairly easy, just make sure you practice writing in the style they want and answering the question completely and you'll be fine. I put very little effort into the unit throughout the sem and skipped the lectures due to a clash and still did very well, it's not too bad at all.
Lecturer: 9/10 - The lectures did drag on a bit and did have some sorta shoed-in components, but in general the lecturers and my tutor were very good at explaining concepts, and they dragged in a lot of real life examples which make things way easier to understand.
Interest: 6/10 - The content is quite cool and useful stuff that you might genuinely notice in real life, although it does feel a bit simple.
Overall: 7/10

I would definitely recommend doing advanced to get a better group, other than that it's a pretty decent interesting unit.