BFC2340: Debt markets and fixed income securities

10% tute participation
30% mid-semester test
60% exam

Give your overall opinion of the subject, lecturers, assessment etc. and a recommendation, plus anything else which you feel is relevant.

Although the content of this subject is relatively straightforward, the way it was taught made it very difficult to comprehend. Due to this being a complete revamp of the previous semester's content, the course was immensely difficult to understand at first. But once I started reading the textbook more, and attempted the questions provided, then it was far easier to make sense of. However, the amount of material provided to study is not enough, so in the future I hope a sample exam is provided which reflects the content taught in this semester's work.

- This is what has left a bitter taste in my mouth, and is the reason why I delayed writing this review for some time. The exam consisted of 21 short answer questions, which comprised 180 marks to be set in 2hrs. Originally the content was supposed to be from lectures 5-12 (not including week 6, as this is when the mid-semester test was held), but Zhongyan was kind enough to remove any content covered in week 12 from the exam as it was mainly on portfolio management of bonds, which is higher-level content that he thought was a bit challenging for most students to comprehend. Tbh, I thought I did alright for this, but in the end my mark was far lower than I expected due to marking issues. However, if most students study well for this, then they should be fine, as most of the questions were taken out of the textbook or were similar to ones in the lecture slides. The main difficulty with this was this is the first unit I've ever taken where

- This is the prescribed textbook, and something that you have to get, either in PDF or hard copy, as the lecture slides do not allow you to get a full grasp of the content for each week. Additionally, there are set readings from the textbook each week, so this is a necessity as you cannot rely on just the lecture slides themselves.

Zhongyan Zhu - Also the chief examiner and unit coordinator of the unit. It was his first time taking the subject, and you could see that in terms of the content delivered in the lectures. All of the lecture slides were taken off online sources, and from what I could tell were not his, so they were often riddled with errors that had to be corrected. In addition, there were a number of times that explanations provided in the lectures were not succinct and made it even more difficult to understand the content. In the future, I hope the slides change as this unit was immensely difficult to understand due to the lecturer delivering slides that weren't his.

- This was held in your week 6 lecture slot, and consisted of 30 MCQ's and 6 short-answer questions to be completed in 75 minutes. I found this reasonably straightforward, as the first-half of the course mainly revised a lot of things from corporate finance before adding on some extra parts such as calculating the full price and clean price of a bond, and some additional theory. I wasn't really pressed for time, however do be advised that most of the questions for the test come from the tute questions covered in previous weeks (lectures from weeks 1-4 and tutorials from weeks 1-5), so if you study and memorise them then you should be fine in terms of answering questions on the mid-semester test. Most people did well on this, with the average being 70% and median being 72%, so if you revise all the lecture content from weeks 1-4 then you should be fine.

None provided, and sample exam that was given on Moodle is irrelevant as it's from an old course that does not follow the same structure as the current one

2.5 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

- The tutorials were pretty standard, you just go over the questions set for the week before's content (i.e. content from week 1 is covered in week 2 tutes and so on). There wasn't much room for discussion though, as the 1hr timeframe isn't enough to comprehend all the coursework. Despite this, I would strongly recommend attending every tute, as there is a 10% tute participation mark, which is relatively simple to get as long as you participate to your best efforts in the tutes by answering questions and providing insights when you can.

1 x 2hr lecture per week
1 x 1hr tute

Semester 2, 2018

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