Prof Choi is an amazing prof, I have thoroughly enjoyed this whole mod under his teaching. Despite his old age, he is still able to relate to us and streamline the lectures accordingly and also made the 8am lectures more bearable with his humorous disposition.
There is honestly not much content in this module in my opinion, and I can understand why a commentator below said another prof finished the syllabus in 12 lectures. Because Prof Choi reviewed probabilities (ST2131 content) until around week 3 and only introduced Markov Chains shortly after, the midterm was somewhat a computation exercise consisting of 10 MCQs with negative marking, and a few short answer questions. But I quote him, “the rationale of setting many questions each with a small amt of marks is to illustrate Central Limit Theorem, the scores will tend to normal and it will be easier to assign letter grades”. Mean was around 31/50, 75th percentile 39/50 and true to what Prof Choi said the scores did resemble a normal curve naturally.
For finals, there was 4 questions (40+20+20+20 marks), but the first one basically consists of 5 unrelated questions. Due to the a lack of time and the large amount of questions, I couldn’t finish it in 2hrs and I doubt if anyone did anyway. There is an emphasis on proofs in this paper, I almost didn’t had the need to touch my calculator for this paper. Do note that Markov Chains can be described qualitatively and you may be asked to specify the state space and transition matrix, and then perform computations based on them. Transforming qualitative statements to a stochastic model under time pressure can be quite frustrating in this mod, but once you’ve mastered that you should do very well in this module.
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