AY2015/2016 Semester 2 PL3239, PL3281, PL4205, EC2303, SW2104

It's going to be the final year of my uni years. Time flies really fast. As I am graduating in a year's time, I asked myself certain questions. Do I know what kind of career I want? Have I prepared myself well for job hunting? Have I made good use of the uni days to build up my skill sets to make myself more outstanding in the working world? Economy recession is here and will be at its peak in a year's time. Are there alternative plans if I did not get a job? What if I don't get the kind of job I want? I am glad I answered all these questions and have been exposing myself well. The key is to start early! All the best for the new academic year! Feel free to drop me comments for advices for academic purposes/how I get exposures.

PL3239 Industrial and Organisational Psychology
Lecturer: Dr. Au Kin-Chung, Al

Assessment
10% Tutorial Participation

12% Tutorial Group Presentation

13% Individual Commentary

20% Midterm Quiz

45% Final Exam

2 hours lecture every week and 2 hours tutorial once every 2 weeks. Prof Au is very friendly and passionate in his teaching. But to be honest, I have some difficulties catching his accent (HK) sometimes. In my opinion, the content of I/O psych can be quite dry and technical. It was not as interesting as expected. Nonetheless, I had understood more about I/O psych and HR related stuffs from this module. I would say I/O psych is quite related to the working world, and you may consider taking it if you are interested in management too. 

Prof Au's midterms and finals have many application questions so do understand the concept well and not just purely memorise them. If I did not remember wrongly, the exams are usually 40 MCQs and essays. For each tutorial, there was a group doing presentation followed by add on content by the tutor and discussions.


PL3281 Lab in Cognitive Psychology
Lecturer: Dr. Nicholas Hon

Assessment

30% Proposal Write-up (group)

50% Full project write-up (individual)

20% Full project presentation (group)

3 hours of lab every week. In the first few labs, Dr. Hon went through with us basic and general things e.g. paradigms that we should know. Then, we have to form groups of 5 in the subsequent labs and come out with our topics. There were group work: Group proposal, group presentation. The final lab report is an individual report. Dr. Hon usually will end the class early for us to have our group discussion and will always offer us help at the end of the class. For lab modules, it is always important to revisit the stats knowledge! Or have some group members with very good stats and SPSS knowledge.


PL4205 Developmental Processes
Lecturer: Dr. Yu Rongjun

Assessment

35% Group presentation

15% Class participation

20% Midterm

30% Final exam

3 hours seminars every week. Dr. Yu provided both the slides and a handout, which has most of the information in the slides and elaborations. It is good to combine information on the slides and handout together to study more efficiently. Every group has to present twice in the whole semesters. The group members and dates of presentation are all allocated by Dr. Yu. The only readings were the research papers for group presentations (plus points of this module - not a lot of readings!). It is important to read the papers and create a summary for it. He will test the information in the research papers for MCQs in both mid terms and finals. It was quite content based for the mid terms, and hence bell curve was really steep. Midterms we have 10 MCQs and 5 short answered questions (20marks). Finals' format was also quite similar to midterm's! I guess the only challenge in this module is to catch lecturer's words. He has an accent that I found it hard to catch esp at the initial phase. 


EC2303 Foundations for Econometrics
Lecturer: Dr. Seo Juwon

Assessment

10% Tutorial attendance and participation

40% Midterm exam

50% Final exam

2 hours lecture and 1 hour tutorial every week. Lectures were webcasted. However, I didn't really like her lecture styles. She gave slides but she would wrote down most of the things she went through in lecture on paper and projected onto the the screen. It is compulsory for econs major. I would advise the non-econs major to not take this module! Unless you have knowledge of uni econs modules because she would use all those knowledge and you will be disadvantaged if you didn't take econs modules before. Mid terms was quite manageable - practicing the tutorial questions helps! However, she likes to come out with questions that were very different from the tutorial as well. And that's what she did for finals. Most of the questions were not seen before and were not of tiny bit of similarities to tutorial questions. I couldn't do the finals. But I believe if you are very good with econs stats, and get the logic, you will be able to score.

SW2104 Human Development over the lifespan
Lecturer: Dr. Ong Teck Hong

Assessment

40% Group project

          - Attendance (punctuality)

          - Participation

60% Final exam

2 hours lecture every week and 2 hours tutorial once every two weeks. It is important to go for lectures as he will test the little things and newspaper report that he mentioned in the lecture. He would also give out some sheet of papers (1 page kind) and these will also come out in the finals! 

My group got an A for our project report. Apply all the theories learnt in lectures to the topic he wants you to do in the project. As for submission of the project, what he wants is good and clear photographs and elaborations of the points. The relevant photograph(s) and it's points should be put in a page! 

His finals were tricky. A bit of logic and yet also tough to choose the MCQs. Memorise and study well for finals. Apply all the theories learnt in the essays!