Module reviews for AY17/18 Semester 1

Perhaps because it's my first semester in university, it was a bit hair-raising especially when midterms and finals rolled around. Overall though, I found the workload pretty manageable. And after studying some cool stuff, I now feel like this:

CFG1010: Roots and Wings 1.0

MCs: 2 for Unrestricted Elective

Delivery:

1 face-to-face workshop in Week 1 or 2 and another in Week 11 or 12
Weekly e-lectures with accompanying notes and readings

Assessment:

Commitment Challenge essays = 3 x 10%, roughly 500 words each
Industry Awareness Project essay = 25%, about 1000 words
Design Your Future = 15%, fill in a template creatively using drawings and diagrams
Online quizzes = 2 x 10%, open-book
Attendance at face-to-face workshops = 10%

Overall rating: 7/10

General comments:

You either love it or hate it. Even though the module is run by the department in charge of getting graduates ready for the job market, it has nothing to do with career or whatever. It's more of a general lifeskills seminar series covering things like empathy, conflict management, and focusing techniques. It can be a bit "ra-ra" at times. Personally, I feel they pushed the mindfulness part too much and it got really cloying after a while, like having one too many chocolate eclairs at a high tea buffet. But there were useful tidbits too. Approach this module with an open mind and you will definitely get something out of it. As for the assessments, just submit everything they ask for according to their guidelines and you should be fine. And TURN UP FOR THE FACE-TO-FACE SESSIONS even if you have tuberculosis because they will make or break your grade! NOTE (added on 4 June 2018): All traces of this module have been expunged from the Centre for Future-Ready Graduates website, and that can only mean that the module has been scrapped because when it was still around they were shouting from the rooftops about it.

EL1101E: The Nature of Language

MCs: 4 - FASS students can use this to clear the Humanities basket or as Unrestricted Elective

Delivery:

Weekly 2-hour lecture
Weekly 1-hour tutorial, where groups of students will present their answers to that week's problem set

Assessment:

Midterm 1 = 25%, all MCQ
Midterm 2 = 25%, all MCQ
Finals = 30%, all MCQ
Participation and attendance = 20%

Lecturer: Dr Nala Lee - 11/10

A relatively junior faculty member in the English department, Dr Lee is nonetheless the best lecturer I had this semester. Maybe she hasn't yet become worn out and jaded by the vagaries of life as an academic. Her love for linguistics comes through strongly in every single lecture she conducts, and she is obviously just as passionate about educating her students as she is very open to contact through the online forums, email and face-to-face consultations. Most importantly, she has a knack for boiling down complicated and abstract concepts into simple terms. And she sets fair tests which only cover content that she explicitly teaches in lectures. For students with special needs, she is very forthcoming and proactive in rendering the required assistance too.

Tutor: Ms Wang Tianxiao - 10/10

Many tutors are actually postgraduate students serving as teaching assistants, and their quality can run the gamut from excellent to downright horrible. Ms Wang is one of the better ones. She actually cares about doing her job properly and comes prepared for every tutorial with her own slides and notes recapping the content from the previous lecture. She also relates to the students well and is responsive to questions over email and face-to-face. Sometimes she seems unsure of certain concepts and will need to confer with the professor first, but that's preferable to someone with a big ego who attempts to smoke out an answer that ends up misleading the students even further.

Module: 11/10

Extremely interesting content, non-strenuous assessments, no need to spend money on a textbook because all readings are provided... I can think of worse ways to fulfil my Humanities Faculty Exposure basket! If you're the type that likes to analyse the nitty-gritty details of things, you'll love this module as it goes into the most micro-level stuff like where you put your tongue when pronouncing certain sounds, rules for putting sounds together, relationships between words and sentences, and so on. Then there are the broader topics which zoom out and give you an overview of how language is used in society as well as some of the psychological aspects of it. I've heard rumours that this module is an easy A, but that is not the case as the bell curve is unforgiving because everyone tends to do well making it hard to stand out, but it's an easy B in any case, and you can always S/U it if you don't like your grade. Disclaimer: I have heaped some seemingly hyperbolic praises here but in my opinion they are deserved. I have no ulterior motive as my major is Communications and New Media and I will probably never take any other English module besides this one. Click here for a preview of the content!

FAS1101: Writing Academically

MCs: 4 - compulsory Written Expression and Communication module for FASS students

Delivery:

Weekly student notes to be read independently
Weekly 2-hour tutorial, mainly small group discussions facilitated by tutor

Assessment:

Research proposal = 15%
Overview essay = 25%
Final essay = 45%
Participation = 15%
The first three components will be about a single topic which you will choose at the start of the semester from a given list.

Tutor: Dr Lee Ming Cherk - 9/10

A kindly old lady, Dr Lee could be anybody's grandmother. She has a warm and maternal streak, and can be a bit muddle-headed and "uncool" in the grand tradition of elderly folk everywhere. If that sounds very endearing, it is. Teaching-wise, she was quite average. Sometimes I got the impression that she was trying to force an element of interactivity into the tutorials even though the subject matter doesn't really lend itself to such a style. But I thought she captured the essence of academic writing well in her recap slides, and this certainly demystified the process for me a lot. She also communicated with the students openly through email and face-to-face consultations, which is important because the feedback really helps to shape your essay into something of acceptable standard.

Module: 8/10

The weekly student notes written by Dr Zhou Ziqian are a bit weird. They come across as arrogant, humorous, psychotic, "emo", thoughtful... all at the same time. One thing is for sure: they're not dreary to read at all. And I love some quotable quotes like the following:

When so little as half-developed thoughts occur to me, it feels pleasurable to hear that procession of keys being struck on a keyboard. This is especially pleasurable when colleagues are within earshot. I write not with the mildness expected of one holding pen and paper, but with the temper of one who works with hammer and anvil.

If that's not poetry then I don't know what is. It's also relatable AF.

The module itself is boring and unremarkable but seeing as it's compulsory there's not much else to be said about it. What I wrote in another post still holds:

... it focuses too much on argumentation and philosophical debate. It fails to cover what in my opinion are more vital topics like how to do referencing properly. A couple of online lessons are devoted to this but it's not enough because referencing is full of intricacies that could trip up even the most careful writer, and yet making a mistake could land said writer in hot soup for academic dishonesty. The module is also too narrow in scope: not all writing done in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences conforms to the "thesis statement + supporting arguments" mould. I know for a fact that very little of such writing is done in the field of psychology, which is dominated by journal articles reporting the results of studies and which use the "Introduction + Methods + Results + Discussion" format. In communications and other subject areas, writing tends to be more discursive rather than argumentative in nature. FAS1101 would be more useful if it was designed to acknowledge these differences and spend a few weeks on each type of writing, rather than using up the entire semester on building a single piece of argumentative essay.

Just plan your workflow early so you give yourself enough time to submit all your assignments by their respective deadlines and you'll be fine.

GER1000: Quantitative Reasoning

MCs: 4 - compulsory General Education

Delivery:

Weekly e-lectures
2-hour tutorials on alternate weeks, prepare your responses to the questions uploaded about a week before class

Assessment:

Group project = 27%, prepare an executive summary and scientific poster about a study reported in a given journal article
Midterm = 20%, all MCQ
Finals = 33%, all MCQ
Weekly online quizzes = 10%
Participation = 10%

Tutor: Mr Desmond Lau - 8/10

Mr Lau has a good sense of humour and is "cool" enough to relate to the students well. But he does tend to get carried away sometimes. He once filled the entire whiteboard with a complex mathematical proof while explaining the solution to a question in that week's tutorial problem set. That was way beyond the scope of the subject and ended up leaving me thoroughly confused until I decided to just totally disregard everything he'd just written. Having said that, he does get his job done, and that's all I really ask for from a tutor.

Module: 6/10

Do you want to impress your friends with a cool party trick like telling them the Bacon Number of Liam Neeson using the Oracle of Bacon? Or equip yourself with the skill to detect whether or not you're being cheated at gambling by a loaded dice or coin? This module is for you! Well, actually it's compulsory for everyone but you know what I mean. But if you want to be able to read news articles and sift out inaccuracies from truths, then you'll be sadly disappointed. This module is very calculation-oriented so that by the end of it, you'll know a whole bunch of formulas and numerical relationships and rules. But this is also arguably is greatest flaw. As I wrote in another post:

... the module kind of misses the point of why it exists in the first place. As claimed during the first lecture, the module is supposed to equip us with the skills and knowledge to critically evaluate reports of findings and data that we may encounter in our daily lives. For example, if we see a newspaper article claiming that "Eating more eggplant boosts libido", we can use what we have learned in GER1000 to decide whether or not to believe the conclusions drawn in the report. Well, so far, I've learned how to calculate Risk Ratio and Odds Ratio, Symmetry Rule, Simpson's Paradox... But nothing that really helps me to, you know, decide whether or not to believe what I see! All those fancy stuff I mentioned are only useful in the back end, when you have all the necessary raw information to work with, but not to everyday consumers. Oh wait, they taught us the maxim that goes "Association/Correlation is not causation" but I could have told you that three years ago, when I was barely into my first year of polytechnic. And even non-psychology polytechnic students learn it. It's old news.

But everyone has to take this module anyway so... Just do all the tutorials faithfully because they really help in preparing for the midterm and final, and try to get a good score for the group project too. Click here for a preview of the content!

NM1101E: Communications, New Media and Society

MCs: 4 - FASS students can use this to clear the Social Science basket or as Unrestricted Elective

Delivery:

Weekly 2-hour lecture
Weekly 1-hour tutorial, mainly working on the group project

Assessment:

Group project = 30%, write a 4500-word report proposing a communications campaign
Midterm = 15%, all MCQ
Finals = 40%, all MCQ
Attendance and participation = 15%

Lecturer: Associate Professor Lonce Wyse - 8/10

The best way to describe Professor Lonce would be "thought-provoking". If you like a professor who doesn't give you any answers but instead gives you a lot of questions about varied topics to chew on, Professor Lonce is for you. He really got me to ponder about many things, like how artificial intelligence is going to affect us, what sort of hidden agenda the news media has, and more. As a result, I feel that I'm able to see issues from different angles now. However, he isn't very good at delivering the core lessons of the module. His lectures tend to be rather messy affairs in which he spends the first 20 minutes rambling on about some current affairs stories, and then tries to proceed into the content proper but gets so lost and sidetracked along the way that neither he nor the students have any idea what's going on anymore. Fortunately, he sets easy questions about the lecture content for the midterm and final. Unfortunately, he also likes to test knowledge from obscure corners of the textbook like when was the internet/digital computer/telephone invented. In his defence, I don't think he's the right professor to teach this module as his expertise lies in sound production, art and design, and coding. This introductory module needs to be taken by someone with a grounding in media theories and campaign strategies. The department should shoulder a bit of responsibility for throwing Professor Lonce into the deep end here.

Tutor: Ms Liu Ximing - 5/10

To put it diplomatically, I feel Ms Liu didn't really care about her role as teaching assistant. We received a sum total of zero emails from her all semester long, and even during tutorials she came across as being rather detached and disinterested. In fact, my project groupmates and I couldn't recall her name until the end of the semester! To be fair, the way the professor had designed the tutorials was for us to use them to do our group project, so there wasn't much teaching to be done in that sense. But she could at least have made the effort to hold some discussions about issues raised in lectures, or recapped some of the lecture content. Not only did she not do any of these things, she also failed to give us any useful feedback or answer any of our queries about the group project.

Module: 7/10

I'm not very sure what to make of this module because like I said, the professor made the content quite disorganised. However, the bits that I did grasp were enjoyable. I also liked doing the group project as it allowed me to apply the concepts from lectures to a hypothetical real-life scenario. This helps a lot in consolidating the knowledge and revising for the midterm and final! Fair disclosure: I have declared Communications and New Media as my major. Click here for a preview of the content!

PL1101E: Introduction to Psychology

MCs: 4 - FASS students can use this to clear the Social Science basket or as Unrestricted Elective

Delivery:

Weekly 2-hour lecture
2-hour tutorials on alternate weeks, prepare your responses to the discussion questions provided before the tutorial

Assessment:

Midterm = 50%, 100 MCQ and 5 open-ended
Finals = 50%, 100 MCQ and 5 open-ended
Research Participation: Marks will be deducted from your final grade if you do not take part in 12 studies conducted by senior psychology students

Lecturer: Associate Professor John Elliott - 10/10

By his own admission, this was his last semester lecturing PL1101E as he's extremely old and nearing retirement. He deserves great respect and it was an honour to be taught by him before he rides off into the sunset. It's not an exaggeration to say that John Elliott is the physical embodiment of psychology in Singapore. At one time he was one of only two psychologists in the employ of the Singapore government, and he also started the psychology programme at NUS. I wish him long and happy golden years ahead.

Tutor: Ms Maria Wijaya - 7/10

Tutorials were meant to be held in a discussion style but due to Ms Wijaya's reluctance to pick on people to give their contributions, they often devolved into sessions filled with awkward silence and self-conscious forceful bursts of exhalation through the nose every time eye contact was accidentally established. She does know her stuff though, and is able to explain the psychological theories and concepts quite well. It's just a pity that she didn't facilitate the tutorials properly.

Module: 8/10

I don't know what your impression of psychology is, but if you think it's all about sitting on couches and talking to people to "make them feel better", or carrying out "profiling" to track down dangerous criminals, then I'm sorry. You've been misled by the media. Some psychologists do indeed work in clinical and forensic settings, but those are but two of the myriad fields in psychology. This module will touch briefly on all of the core areas. It is absolutely jam-packed with theories and concepts, but contrary to popular belief, there's no need to sleep with your textbook in the hope that the knowledge will diffuse into your brain. Your focus should be on understanding as this is a much easier way of remembering the content. The assessments do not require word-for-word reproduction of the textbook or lecture notes, so do not waste your energy and time memorising! You'll miss the forest for the trees, and not be able to appreciate the true wisdom of what psychology is trying to teach you: to know yourself and others better, so that you can lead a more satisfying life. Click here for a preview of the content!

I hope these module reviews have helped you in your decision making on which modules to choose for yourself, or let you know what to expect from the compulsory modules. At the time of writing, this is my maiden attempt at producing module reviews, so the formatting may be a little crude and some information you are looking for may have been inadvertently omitted. Do feel free to drop a comment below if that's the case. I'll probably also tweak the layout of my module reviews when I publish my module reviews next semester. Until then!

Hands on with the Xiaomi Mi A1

I recently renewed my contract with M1 and upgraded my handset to the Xiaomi Mi A1. This reasonably new model comes with an affordable price tag and packs a punch with powerful specs.

This review is written in descriptive terms and I have purposely kept numbers to a minimum. If you want technical information about the phone, look here.

Design

The Mi A1 is pretty, with a rather feminine body accentuated by the gold colour that I chose for mine. The other option is black.

It fits nicely in the hand, even my small ones. However, the screen is still big enough that watching videos and playing games are pleasurable.

If I have one complaint about the physical aspect of the phone, it would be regarding the buttons. The hard power button, located in its usual position halfway down the right edge of the chassis, feels mushy when pressed and it can be difficult to tell if you have successfully activated it. Along the bottom, the three touch buttons for Menu, Home, and Back suffer from a different problem: their areas of activation are very limited and you have to be extremely accurate in hitting the correct spot in order to get them to respond. This means that if you keep your eyes on the screen while trying to make the phone go back, you are likely to miss the button completely and be left bewildered for a couple of seconds wondering why the phone failed to do what you wanted.

Software

The stock Android that the Mi A1 has by default can be a bit disorienting because most of us would be used to the Android skins of our favourite brands, such as HTC Sense or Xiaomi's own MIUI.

Stock Android is really bare-bones stuff. Your phone will work, but not much besides. The good thing is the lack of bloatware, those redundant apps that come together with every new phone and cannot be deleted. But some very basic apps that should be there are also omitted. For example, there is no file manager app and you will have to install a third-party one from the Play Store.

Personalisation can also be a challenge. Stock Android does not give you the option to easily add your own custom ringtones, notification sounds and alarms. You will have to use the third-party file manager app mentioned above to copy the sound files you want to use into the respective "Ringtones", "Notifications", or "Alarms" folders in the phone's internal memory, then go to the Settings menu where you should now be able to find your desired sound clips.

The keyboard is another area which is sorely lacking. Its predictive feature does not seem to learn my personal language patterns well, but does pick up obscure things like Chinese names (e.g., Swee Ling). It also fails to autocorrect properly even if only one letter out of the whole word is wrong. If you have a favourite third-party keyboard, just use that straight off the bat.

On the plus side, being on the Android One programme means that your phone gets all the latest updates straight from Google. Your phone will be protected against the newest cybersecurity threats. These patches go out about once a month. Each time, you will have to connect to the internet to download a tranche of about a couple of gigabytes, and then let the phone install the update and restart itself. The entire process takes about 15 minutes.

Performance

I readily admit that I abuse my phones. They work really hard for me as I use them for many intensive activities. It was with this in mind that I selected the Mi A1 with its beefy RAM, generous internal storage capacity, and large battery.

The phone does not disappoint on any of these counts. It is a joy to use as it feels snappy and handles regular tasks with impunity. Multitasking is a breeze too. No need to worry about sending apps to the background while you attend to incoming messages or emails. They will be in the exact same state you left them in when you return, and you can resume using them immediately with no noticeable lag.

I have installed dozens of apps in my phone so far and its internal memory is only about half full. Of course, it helps that there is no bloatware taking up valuable space.

The battery has amazing endurance and has no problem lasting a full day of normal usage. I have even watched YouTube videos for about five hours continuously and the battery level only reached about half. To get the most out of both your screen and battery, set the brightness to the dynamic mode, which will adjust itself according to the ambient lighting in your surroundings. Also set your geolocation to battery-saving as this will stretch your battery life even further while still being accurate enough for most purposes.

Speaking of YouTube videos, the Mi A1 has a real powerhouse of a speaker! It is LOUD and clear, and I love watching videos and listening to music on my new phone.

In case you are wondering, I have deliberately not commented on the display and camera, which are standard elements in any phone review. This is because I am not fussy about those parts of a phone beyond whether they work or not. The Mi A1 has a fancy dual camera at the back which supposedly enhances depth-of-field, but I have no idea what that means and have not noticed anything different in my shots so far. And the display is functional and renders images, videos, and games well. That is all that matters to me and is all I can say on this issue.

All in all, the Xiaomi Mi A1 delivers high-end performance for a low-end price. It has its flaws, particularly to do with the drawbacks of the stock Android operating system. But those can be rectified yourself within minutes using downloadable third-party apps from the Play Store, and should not detract from what is a solid and satisfying piece of hardware that deserves a place in everyone's pocket.