On Two Other Matters

Greetings,

I shall post here regarding 2 mods, the first being a continuation of the previous post on Management and Organisation and the second regarding my elective, Taming Chaos.

On to MNO:
As for this semester, there were 2 quizzes and no final exam. Each quiz constitutes 15% of the final grade. Both quizzes I did not do so well, I have mostly myself to blame.

However, it has come to my attention that there were question banks that were circulating around that my class was not privy to. Well, if it were teacher initiated, shame on the coordinator for not unifying the playing field. If the students found it themselves, well done for their resourcefulness.

But whatever the case, the most important thing in my opinion is that the actual quiz had questions that essentially were copied over from this question bank with NO alteration. Meaning, THE ANSWERS WERE MADE AVAILABLE BEFORE THE ACTUAL QUIZ and NOT EVERYONE HAD IT.

Mind you, this was an MCQ quiz. This is extremely frustrating. Who's to blame? Professors? Students? I may sound like a simple disgruntled person getting caught on the wrong side of the dice game. But seriously, how can a graded mcq quiz copy word for word from an online source (I'm presuming)? Disgusting.

It's funny. I did ask my prof once whether they could review the previous quiz because I honestly wanted to see where I've gone wrong. He told me it's too much of a hassle, the answers are in the textbook, blah blah. Now I know the real reason. Sheesh.

Well so much for that, Ill be real glad if I manage an A-.

On to GEM2505 ie Taming Chaos:
The module description was what got me interested in it. But unfortunately, I got kind of scammed by the description. The only link showed a European prof as the lecturer and he seemed like your typical eccentric science prof with a sense of humour. SO I thought, ok its a relatively cool prof, Ill go for it. Turns out, the prof is Chinese, he can't really speak very well, finds it hard to express himself at times and has effectively made me use up my first S/U. Despite the topics (still) being very interesting, I find it so difficult to absorb anything from him. It's difficult also trying to figure out what is important for exams because to be honest, the way it is presented gives the impression that nothing is important. lol.

The saving grace is that the tutorial sessions are really mind opening. I learnt more in that one hour on even weeks than I did in 2 hours twice a week. The tutor is an Indian post grad student I believe. Well, all in all the topics are interesting, I've learnt about Chaos Theory, Fractals, Complex Networks etc.

If there was anything that could make this module better with whatever resources that are currently at hand, it would be this: Shorten the weekly lectures. Once a week is enough. Seriously. And make tutorials every week.

On the bright side I've saved up a fair amount of G account points I can now use to own freshies next sem haha.

Good Day!