NUS Module Reviews 2023/2024 Business Analytics (BZA), School of Computing (SoC) - Y2S1: ST2334, GEX1014, GESS1025

 

ST2334 Probability and Statistics

Introduction:

Link to Nusmods: https://nusmods.com/courses/ST2334/probability-and-statistics

Semester 1

Lecturer: Yu Tao

Timetable Workload (lecture + tutorial + lab): 2 + 1 + 0

Blended Learning: a mix of pre-recorded videos and E-hybrid teaching will be used. Students need to watch recorded videos before attending the lectures. Thus, the actual lecture time is longer than 2 hours per week.

Attendance:

Both lecture and tutorial has attendance. The details are covered in Lectures and Tutorials sessions respectively.

Lecture Recordings: Videos are uploaded after the live lectures if I remember correctly.

Grading Scheme / Assessment:

Final: 60%

Midterm: 25%

Lecture Attendance: 10%

Tutorial Attendance: 5%

Lectures:

Since there are in-lecture quizzes, it's advisable to attend every lecture. In my cohort, students had the option to either attend live lectures via Zoom or face to face sessions on campus. 

Lecture Attendance counts 10% towards the final grade. There will be in-class quizzes for every Wednesday’s lecture from 17.15 to 18.00; usually, it can be finished within 10 minutes, and can be done using a mobile phone. Each quiz typically consists of about three MCQs and multiple attempts are allowed if I remember correctly. The last submission will be used for score calculation. Prof Yu usually goes through some questions if asked but generally does not provide explicit answers.

Format: Quiz through Canvas. The password will be announced in class at 17.15.

Discussion among peers is allowed; but you need to answer the questions in Canvas on your own.

There will be about 11 exercises; participating all the exercises is strongly encouraged, but only the 8 best performed exercises will be picked and counted to form the 10% of your final grades.

Tutorials:

Tutorials start in week 3. Just typical tutorials from math / stats department, in which TAs do a brief revision and go through the tutorial questions.

Tutorial Attendance counts 5% towards the final grade.

Tutorial attendance will be recorded in the classroom by your tutors. There will be 10 tutorials. Skipping 4 will not affect your final mark. After which, skipping each tutorial will result in losing 1% of your final mark, until all the 5% of the marks are lost.

Exam Settings:

Midterm (week 8, 1 hr or 1.5 hrs I can't remember clearly)

Final (week 13, 2 hrs or 2.5 hrs I can't remember clearly)

Both midterm and final were open-book, conducted on campus, face to face using Examplify. However, only hardcopies were allowed, which means you had to print or write down everything you needed and bring it to the venue. I found this rule quite annoying. Graphical calculators were allowed but not necessary. In fact, calculators overall weren't necessary—I, a dumbass, forgot to bring mine for the final exam. I ended up using Examplify's calculator in the tool kit, which was inconvenient and a bit time-consuming since I was not familiar with it.

For midterm, there were MCQ + MRQ + True/False + Fill in the Blank questions. The content covered in the first half of the semester was generally easy, and the midterm exam reflected this, leading to a steep and left-skewed bell curve. Therefore, it's advisable to aim for full marks or as high a score as possible.

For the final exam, the question types were the same to those on the midterm. However, I found the final to be significantly harder because the content from the second half of the semester was more challenging. Although the final exam covered all topics, most of the content tested was from the second half of the semester.

Conclusion:

The course covers a range of topics in statistics, so it's important to focus on areas where you may be less confident to ensure you do well. Additionally, be careful during exams, as no calculation steps are required for the questions. This means there's no error-carry-forward, so even a small mistake can result in losing the entire mark for that question.

GEX1014 Logic

Introduction:

Link to Nusmods: https://nusmods.com/courses/GEX1014/logic

Semester 1

Lecturer: Lavinia Picollo

Timetable Workload (lecture + tutorial + lab): 2 + 2 + 0 (biweekly)

Tutorials on week 3, 5, 9, 11 only

Attendance: For my cohort, no attendance at all.

Lecture Recordings: Videos are uploaded after the live lectures if I remember correctly.

Grading Scheme / Assessment:

Problem Set 1: 25%

Midterm: 25%

Problem Set 2: 25%

Problem Set 3: 25%

I have a friend taking the same course during semester 2 in the same school year. According to her, the assessment components are more diverse and quite different from mine.

Lectures:

I attended all the live lectures because I found the content interesting. However, some of my friends felt that the lectures were too dry and not engaging enough. I actually agree with them. Professor Picollo tends to go straight to the points and explain things in detail. While she tries to make the content fun by using some nonsensical or ridiculous examples, it's often not enough to keep students engaged. There are no polls, quizzes, or group discussions (not that I’m a fan of group discussions), so the lecture often feels like a continuous stream of information with little to break the momentum. If you're not particularly interested in the content, you might find the lectures a bit insufferable.

Additionally, Professor Picollo has a soft voice, which can make the lectures even more sleep-inducing, so you might want to prepare some coffee in advance.

Tutorials:

Tutorials start in week 3 and are held on a biweekly basis, which I really appreciate. Students are encouraged to attempt the question sets beforehand, though not all questions will be discussed during the tutorials. The TA typically selects a few questions, gives students some time to work on them, and then goes through those questions (and sometimes others as well).

Also, I don't think they post solutions for the tutorials, so if you attempt questions that aren't covered during the tutorial, you may consult the TA about the answers after class dismisses.

Attending the tutorials is highly recommended because the tutorial questions significantly enhance your understanding of the topics. They are also quite similar to the exam questions, making them valuable practice for the assessments.

Exam Settings:

The midterm was scheduled during one week's lecture, likely after week 6. It was an open-book exam, one hour long, held on campus, and administered face-to-face via Canvas quiz. The questions were mostly MCQ and MRQ, if I recall correctly. The time constraints were very tight, and you had to be extremely careful, as there were traps throughout the questions.

Problem Sets:

I don't remember the exact format of the problem sets, but I believe they were also one hour long and open-book. They were own-time-own-target and just needed to be completed before their respective deadlines. The time constraints were tight as well, especially for the last problem set.

Conclusion:

I have contradicted feelings about this course. On one hand, I find it really interesting and thoroughly enjoyed studying the course. If you have an investigative nature and enjoy logical thinking, you might feel the same way. On the other hand, I think the assessment components are too limited, which results in a steep and left-skewed bell curve. If you mess up on even one problem set, it can seriously impact your final grade. Additionally, if you’re not particularly interested in logic, your learning experience may be quite painful.

If you are unsure about whether you are interested in this course or not, you may refer to the below youtube video for a better understanding of what basic logics are. The content covered in that videos are all part of the course syllabus. However, I highly recommend you to enrol in GEX1014 first to try it yourself (since you can drop anytime before midterm if you don't like it). It's more interesting than it looks like.

I've also heard people say that if you're bad at math, there's no way you can do well in logic. That's not true. In fact, even if you're good at math, you might still struggle with logic. However, there is one thing that logic shares with math: sometimes you may not grasp it intuitively, but you can always apply the formulas or rules to get the correct answers.

GESS1025 Singapore: Imagining the Next 50 Years

Introduction:

Link to Nusmods: https://nusmods.com/courses/GESS1025/singapore-imagining-the-next-50-years

Semester 1

Tutor: Feng Wen Chong

Timetable Workload (lecture + tutorial + lab): 0 + 2 (biweekly) + 0

Tutorials are held on week 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13 only.

Attendance:

Tutorial has attendance and there is class participation as well.

Lecture Recordings: There are lectures online which are used for e-learning.

Grading Scheme / Assessment:

The course is graded on CS/CU basis.

Sorry but I can't find the grading scheme, so I'll just list down all components I remembered.

Critical Reflection - There is an article to read before each tutorial session and students need to write a reflection of about 200 - 300 words on it. 

Group Project - Includes a group presentation and submission of written report and slides. From week 5's session onwards, there will be one group presenting per tutorial. 

Final Quiz - It is open book, but only hard copies are allowed. It covers everything, from the tutorials to the lectures to the readings ... etc.

Lectures:

It's a shame that I only realised there were recorded lectures on week 11 or something. So ya, too busy to watch anything.

Tutorials:

I really enjoy tutorials, mainly because the content is academically irrelevant to my major, which gives me extra confidence in sharing my opinions without the fear of making mistakes. Additionally, my TA is very insightful and provides all kinds of examples and stories that are really interesting to hear. Overall, I found tutorials relaxing and I really gained a lot of insights and thoughts on Singapore's past and future.

Critical Reflections:

Some of the readings are quite long, and it takes me a considerable amount of time to finish them. I didn’t read everything in full detail; for parts that didn’t interest me as much, I just skimmed through. However, I still recommend that you read the materials yourself to better prepare for the final quiz.

Exam Settings:

Format:

There will be 3 sections and the quiz is open-book (hard copies only):

1. Section A will comprise 10 MCQs (10 marks)

2. Section B will comprise True/False questions (10 marks)

3. Section C will comprise 2 short-answer questions (10 marks)

The quiz is held in campus, face to face via pen and paper. 

Conclusion:

It's a 4 units CS/CU mod, what can I say, just go bid for it. They said senior students are prioritised during course registration, but I managed to enrol in the course as a year two student. So, this is life and we never know. You may want to apply for it every semester from Y1S1 until you are finally enrolled in this mod and trust me it's worth it.