ATS2779: Climate Change and Variability

prac reports -- 6x 5% = 30%
writing task -- 35%
exam 35%

I was a bit apprehensive going into this unit because it got a bit of a bad rep... but I was very pleasantly surprised. This is the first year that Ailie taught this unit and she did an excellent job. She is engaging, passionate about her work, a good teacher and very helpful (and made a good solid effort to learn everyone's names). We covered stuff about past climate variability, current climate variability, stuff about projections, modelling climate, and how various government bodies responded (or have not responded) to climate change. Although I'd seen some of the content before, quite a bit of it was new to me and so it was very interesting. I liked learning about it. There's a lot of content and the lectures are a tad fast, so if you're not a good note taker you might struggle a bit.

The only reason that I docked a mark off of my rating was that at the start of the semester the practicals were BAD. We had two hour classes but the amount of work we were supposed to do in them was really not possible. Also, there were major discrepancies in marking between tutors -- those who were in Ailie's prac class were marked generously but everyone else was marked (very!) harshly. However once it was found out, all of our marks were adjusted and our pracs became shorter too and turned out to be quite enjoyable. Mostly it's computer work in Excel, sifting through various data and answering questions based on it.

The other thing I didn't like was that stuff took FOREVER to come back to us. Though halfway through the unit the person taking the prac classes ditched and so Ailie took ALL of the classes on, so maybe that's why. The general consensus was that she was such a nice person that we couldn't mind *too* much, but if you're anal-retentive about getting work back on time you'll probably be a bit annoyed.

The writing task was quite fun, you picked a Wikipedia article on climate science and critiqued it in 2000 words, which is different from your standard geography essay. Naturally I picked something relatively short that had a fair few errors so I could spend most of my time saying that websites are not good sources of academic information. It was a bit of a drain to individually read and critique each reference though.

I found myself doing a fair amount of work for this unit, but overall it was nicely structured and there was a clear progression between topics. Lectures were engaging (though a very small turnout, probably because of previous years?) and so in order to I think encourage attendance we had 'bonus questions' that were asked during lectures, and we could answer them later for a once-off reward of 3 free marks to the best answer. A good idea in theory, but in practice it meant that people attended lectures until they got their bonus marks and they stopped coming.

The exam was straight forward, 5 short answer questions and 3 mini-essays. I found it to be very fair. No past exams because the unit has apparently been revamped, so past exams would have been a bit useless anyways. It's easy to pass this unit but if you want to do well you need to put in some effort. Overall I really liked this unit and I'd recommend it, especially if Ailie continues to take this unit next year.

Ailie Gallant

None (see comments), but the review lecture gave a good indication of what the exam would be like.

4 out of 5

Yes

Global Warming by Houghton. It's certainly useful but not absolutely necessary.

2x 1 hour lectures per week, plus fortnightly 2 hour pracs

Sem 2 2013

HD