MA1512
Differential Equations for Engineering is a 2 MC module that took
place from Week 8 - 13. Lectures were from weeks 8 - 12 and tutorials were
from weeks 9 - 13. This module had a couple of problems, in my opinion, but overall was still manageable. This module took place right after MA1513 and the lectures and tutorials were at the exact same time slot as MA1513. This module is a new module which is supposed to replace MA1506 (or part of it, and the other part covered by MA1513). It covers different concepts of DEs and includes Laplace transforms as well.
Assessment
4% Class Participation (only required to attend one tutorial session)
16% Online Quiz (only one quiz with 4 questions)
80% Finals (Closed Book, with 2 page cheat sheet)
Lecturer: A/Prof Leung Pui Fai, Fred
Tutor: Marciuk, Adriana Ewa
Lectures
Lectures
were 1 hour long, like MA1513, which took place once a week. There were five of them in total. The main difference from MA1513 was that there was no lecture quiz at the end of the lecture. Furthermore, since there was only 1 hour, the lecturer tend to explain only one portion of the topic and expect us to understand the rest through watching the online webcasts. Thus, I gave up attending lectures after going for the first one. I then decided to just watch the online videos and attend tutorial (which was a good choice imo). Furthermore, there wasn't even like a "module overview" kind of thing on the first lecture and the lecturer just went straight into the topic. I mean it's not exactly a bad thing but I really like lecturers that give a broad overview of the entire module.
The lecture notes were totally just copied off from MA1506. There were some notes where the lecturers were too lazy to change the title and it was still called MA1506. Furthermore, the notes were pretty messy as well. I guess it was because MA1513 gave really really really precise, clear and detailed notes which resulted in the MA1512 notes looking really bad.
Tutorial
Tutorials
were held once a week and were 2 hours long. The tutor would usually
give a brief summary of the topic, followed by going through the
tutorial questions that were prepared for that week and then giving us
time to do the in-class assignment. The tutor was the same as for MA1513. She follows closely to the answer sheet which isn't too bad imo.
The problem with this module is that we only need to attend ONE tutorial out of the 5 tutorials to get the 4% of the grades. I mean it is a good thing if you think about it but there was a lack of commitment to this module because of this.
The other 16% was for ONE online quiz which took place around week 9/10. There were 4 questions to tackle and we only need to fill in the final answer. No working was required and we could freely discuss with our friends before submitting the quiz. Thus, it wasn't much of an issue.
Final Exam
The
finals for this module took place on the last Sunday of the finals week which was kinda annoying. The paper was also 1.5 hours long but only consisted of 5 questions in total (as compared to 6 for MA1511 and MA1513). Time management was still really important but it wasn't as stressful as compared to the other two papers.
You can view my 2 page cheat sheet here.
You can view my 2 page cheat sheet here.
Expected Grade: A
Final Grade: A+
Final Comments
I guessed the lecturer (from the online webcast) was good in explaining the concepts to us. The content was really messy but if you prepare your own notes well, this module shouldn't really be much of a problem.
Stay tuned for more updates.
- Alan
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