Assessment:
(40%) Continuous Assessment: 5 homeworks, 2 midterms (no cheatsheets, Prof Chan will provide), the 4 best homework scores are computed in the CA score together with the 2 midterms.
(60%) Finals.
Overall impression: If you’re taking it in Y2S2, you’re likely to be one of the few Year 2s in the cohort, but Prof Chan teaches really well so don’t be too afraid of the competition. Thanks to Prof Chan’s teaching, I didn’t find the content too
difficult, and the amount of content taught in this module is quite little after I did my finals revision.
Homeworks: Prof Chan doesn’t have the habit of repeating homework questions, even if you dig up past 10 years of Prof Chan’s homework, you’d still not be able to find the same question appearing so don’t bother searching. The questions are not straightforward but they are a good practice to consolidate your lecture content. The 75th percentile score is usually 19/20 or 20/20 so be sure to get full marks, I think I averaged 19/20 for all 5 homeworks which is about the median of the cohort.
Midterms: My score: MT1 (week 7): 70/80 (average: 56, top: 78), MT2 (week 11): 62/80 (average: 59, top 74). 2 midterms was quite stressful to prepare for at first, but thanks to the 2nd midterm, which covered all of the examinable topics for finals, my revision for finals is quite short. The midterms are quite difficult to finish on time as Prof Chan doesn’t like to set easy papers, and he’ll cramp 7 questions with multiple parts in 90 mins. The first few are always standard questions, so be sure to practice them and max out the marks for them. For the rest of the questions just try your best lol. Prof Chan is not lenient in giving partial credit, if you only managed to work out 50% of the question and scribble down a list of garbage that’s useful in solving the remaining 50%, he’ll only give you 2/6. My mediocre score in MT2 made me realise that I should focus more on getting my questions fully correct than try to attempt the queer questions poorly.
Finals: Thanks to the biweekly homework and 2 midterms, I had sufficient practice to tackle the finals. Some questions look daunting at first, but due to the lack of content, there’s only that many tricks that Prof Chan can test and I got many of those tricks on my fingertips (no self-made cheatsheets btw).
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