I WOULD HIGHLY ADVISE THAT YOU DO NOT ENROL IN THIS UNIT IF YOU CAN AVOID IT. It is incredibly poorly run. The lectures were dull and lacked structure and vocal engagement. Personally, I found the unit convener to not be approachable or helpful despite numerous interactions as well as difficult to communicate with. The pracs don’t correspond to the lecture material and you use a statistical/graphing app for practical results that produced large amounts of stats/info that was stated by the unit convener to allegedly be covered in the final exam...but never was - so it was a huge waste of time. For the news article evaluation and the report the similarity report was disabled by the unit convener and then he turned around and penalised you for having a high similarity report AND he also failed to realise that you wouldn’t re-upload the document. THIS PROBLEM WAS CONTINUED FOR THE 20% REPORT whereby he failed to simply change the settings for ilearn so the unit couldn’t see their similarity report or reupload a document into turnitin. In addition, the unit had to write a scientific report on an IMAGINARY fruit, which was difficult for students to find published papers and literature. The final exam was a mess with the paper being based on the weekly readings. (If you plan to undertake the unit- I would highly recommend reading all the weekly readings as there is more than approx 3-4 each week). Also despite the unit guide saying the prac results will be released weekly, the results were only released days before Macquarie’s session 1’s results were released. So you ended up having 10% of your mark and 20% from the reports unaccountable as they were also meant to be released in week 13 but ended up released close to the established Macqurie results release day. The cherry on top was that despite it stating clearly in the unit guide established from the beginning of the unit AND a lengthy discussion in the first lecture detailing how the 40% final exam would be a hurdle....a mere week after the examination was held a notification was released stating that “the final exam was not a hurdle. Apologies for any confusion caused.” It was incredibly sketchy and made you speculate if too many students failed to meet the hurdle so they changed the game to save their butts. Since when can the staff change major details of a final exam written in the unit guide AFTER an exam??? So you put yourself under stress and worry about reaching the hurdle when you don’t have to. However, if you plan to complete this unit, the weekly material quizzes are your best friend and are easy to do well in. Good luck!!

Anonymous, Semester 1, 2019

Slightly unorganised but otherwise very interesting. Prac classes were very hands on and covered interesting content

Anonymous, Semester 1, 2017