Welp, if high and very low was a subject. This subject, if I could perfectly describe it, is nitty gritty and pretty much concerns with everything possible. At least with the assignments. Take that however you want. It is a subject that, if I could, would only take bits and pieces out of it and benefit from that specifically. Around 60% of it was not worth it, at least not with what I'd be doing. But hey, it's not like I have a choice. Another thing is the tutors and lecturers really gotta go with that "provide minimal help" approach. Sometimes for whatever reasons, their responses are overly cryptic and I gotta say, it really annoys me over time. I really did not enjoy it on that front. And oh boy, the tutorial. They are simply, utterly, without any other word to possibly sugarcoat it, useless. Pretty sure it's mainly my tutor but still my experience was not great, as you can probably tell. There is a clear disconnect between the lectures and the assignments, and you've got to sort of push yourself through to reach to the point where you can make clear connections between them. Because they try to omit the stuff too closely related to the assignments (not very convincingly difficult then is it), which means you're pretty much just going in doing something brand new with no support (kind of defeats the purpose of teaching but oh well), you definitely have to scout for clues everywhere. Content-wise, it's pretty good honestly. I know it's a very packed subject but the content itself is very beneficial. BUT, the assignments are a different story. Again, nitty gritty, annoying stuff that you only gain from it if you truly DO it in the future. They aren't particularly difficult (actually not at all), but they are annoying and highly uninteresting to me at least. 4/10 won't particularly recommend, but hey, you're a compsci unimelb student so what choice do you have right.

The content is interesting and useful. The assignments were brutal, took me weeks of solely focusing on them, but it doesn't hurt to make 1 aspect of a class incredibly hard. We were also provided a ton of practice problems leading up to the exam, and assistance on Ed. However there's a fundamental problem with this class, that makes it the hardest and worst class I've ever taken. The lecture content is basically swaths of definitions, paragraphs, concepts, diagrams, and dot points; and the tutorials require a little more investigation, to apply what we learned to a question. This is already problematic, and is unlike the vast majority of science classes - Normally a class would be one or the other: rote memorising concepts, or working through problems. The most fair way to assess these dense lectures and hands-on tutorial questions, would be to quiz us on specific outtakes of the lectures, and to ask us similar applied questions to the tutorials, but with different numbers (for example a large Dijkstra table, a smaller Flow diagram, mapping and converting subnets). Instead, it became increasingly clear working through the practice materials we had, that we're expected to investigate and learn something new with every question. We were also expected to have unreasonably excellent understanding skills, that's not possible for most people in time constraint. I myself was betting on being asked something similar to what I worked on before - so I worked through and thoroughly understood every lecture and practice problem (practice exam, past exam, tutorials, midsems, etc). Another way to think of it is that we were expected to have a deeper understanding of a broader scope of topics than what we learned - So that in theory, the lectures+tutorials would only be a subset of our knowledge, and so that we have already studied whatever they could throw at us related to OS's or networks. This level of understanding is impossible, given most of us do not have the time to focus full-time on a single subject. The exam itself ended up being half fair and half unfair. There were many reasonable questions, with a few gotcha's sprinkled in. However a large proportion of the marks was something we never directly worked on before, and an additional question or two I believe we haven't learned at all. Many people seem to have the same complaint. This caps the max mark for a huge proportion of the cohort to as low as 70%, and since it's unlikely many people got 100% of the marks outside of these highly weighted questions, many people are at risk of failing. Considering that this class has historically had high failure rates, it's very unlikely there'd be scaling or some readjustment. Most people would want this class over and done with, even just a mere pass to obtain their degree - but even a mere pass is out of reach for maybe 30% of the cohort, and an additional 30% are relying on some lenience.

Yeah this subject was a bit of a shit show this semester, mostly in regards to the assignments submissions and markings. Content was interesting (operating systems) at times though overall I didn't find it the most interesting in the world. It's odd how it looks like they're phasing the operating systems section out of the course, as they only covered it in the last 2 weeks. Lecturers were mostly alright, Junhao giving a more structured and thorough overview of the content, while Lachlan was somewhat vague at times though was more enthusiastic and tried to foster student participation in the lectures. Assignments were something else. Imagine having more than half the cohort getting < 8/15 because the automatic marking submission script is just broken. Bare in mind BOTH assignments had cases where students would lose marks where they should not have. The assignments weren't exactly stimulating either, the first was literally just a glorified if...else... program in terms of socket programming. Overall not a terribly interesting subject, I did it as an elective and I would personally much prefer to have done something else.

This is a very content heavy subject. You're taught an overview of computer networking along with a little bit of operating systems / computer architecture towards the end. The two projects are reasonable in difficulty but can take quite some time if you haven't really kept up to date with the labs. As always I dislike computing exams that are worth more than 50% (this one is 60%), since I always find I learn the most from completing the projects. There were two lecturers in sem 1 2019. One took the first half of the course (he was new) and the other took the second half (not sure if he was new or not). Both did a good job and the slides were well-prepared. Personally, subjects like this are not really why I'm doing computing. I'm much most interested in the algorithms stuff, like what's taught in COMP20007 Design of algorithms and COMP30024 Artificial Intelligence. If you're the same, you might not have a great time with this subject, but that isn't really the fault of the lecturer and the importance of the content is apparent.

Actually interesting content marred by the world's most incompetent lecturer and useless lab demonstrator.