In light that I’ve been getting some traffic over the past few weeks from people googling ‘GEM2901′, I’ve decided to write this post which will hopefully benefit this particular audience who have been coming here only to find themselves disappointed with the lack of any relevant information.
As usual, the thoughts and opinions here are my own, and what I describe here is an experience that may basically be unique to me, so understand this may not be the case for everyone. I took GEM2901 Reporting Statistics in the Media last semester, and as always (I suspect), it was a night class on Tuesday evenings.
Prior to bidding for this module, I had heard from others that it was an easy module with only two projects and a final exam. On hindsight, it’s a pretty accurate way of describing the module, cause there simply isn’t much more than that. For what it’s worth, I bid for this module over the course of a few days and managed to get it at a whopping 600+ general points (which practically wiped out my account considering I only had two semesters’ worth).
I must say that throughout the semester, the workload for GEM2901 was relatively insignificant to that of the other modules. The lecturer is apparently the same person who has been teaching this module for the past few semesters, so the teaching style is most likely going to be the same. To be honest, after I attended the first lecture, I found it to be quite a waste of time, as he spent quite a fair bit of time telling stories (credit to him, most were actually funny) instead of breezing through the slides which had an average of less than thirty words each.
This irked me in quite a manner considering it was a night class, and although he still managed to end his three-hour lecture early, I still felt that some time was wasted. Using this as an excuse, or perhaps as a cover for laziness, I attended only about three more of his lectures for the rest of the semester, and mostly nearer the final examinations.
The projects were pretty straightforward to do, although each were rather heavily-weighted at twenty percent. I’m also not sure what his marking criteria was, but my group ended up with an A- and B respectively, or something like that. I think in the past he used to give numeric scores (say, 16/20) so knowing a letter grade didn’t really help much. The projects were given early in the semester however, with a fairly considerate deadline about two months later.
I talked about the GEM2901 final examination here, so I won’t really add anything else regarding that. As for the lecture notes, I didn’t use a textbook, just a set of photocopied notes which I got from my friend at around three dollars. I would say reading the slides and tutorials were sufficient for me. I hope that if you found this post looking for ‘GEM2901′, this personal anecdote of mine will help you to make a slightly more informed choice. For me, this was a module worth taking.
