ENE1621: Environmental Engineering

Midsem test – 5% - Fairly straightforward test in the form of short answer questions. Almost all material from lectures and textbook.

Scrapbook – 5% - Quite a strange assessment. Have to collect news articles and critique them. The time spent doing this is not really justified in the percentage of overall unit mark.

Group Project – 30% - Need to put quite a lot of effort into this one. You’ll work in groups have to balance this project with other assignments. Make sure you keep on track and don’t slack off, cos the due date will creep up on you. I recommend doing lots of research and planning before you start writing the final report.

Assignment 1(Gavin) – 5% - Involved analysing household bills and energy/water use. This assignment was particularly tedious. The instructions were vague and I often felt very frustrated trying to figure out the best way to approach this one.

Assignment 2(Cordelia) – 5% - Straightforward assessment in the form of essay style questions. Requires a bit of reading, research and planning. I did this one hungover in a few hours, after going on a pub crawl, and still got a very good mark. Moral of story: university marking is subjective and sometimes unpredictable.

Exam – 50% - Similar format to midsem test, but this time there are long answer questions. Be prepared to write a lot during this exam. It is three hours long, and you need to pump out a lot during that time, so know the course content well, and have a practice at formulating answers.

This unit definitely gave me a good idea of how to approach environmental engineering as a discipline. Some of the content is truly fascinating, and some of it is dead boring. The exam will cover almost everything from the entire semester. I recommend therefore, that you take the unit seriously. I had no serious issues with the lecturers, but there are flaws in the assessment. The group project requires a huge amount of effort, and you will often have to complete other assignments while still working on the group project. This makes for a very stressful time. Furthmore, the weighting of the smaller assignments is never really justified in the overall unit mark. I had to expend a lot of effort in finishing these fiddly little assignments and scrapbook, when I would have rather worked on the group project. All in all, not a bad unit, but I think a rethink of the assessment is needed.

Gavin Mudd and Cordelia Selomulya. Both lecturers are clear and concise, but I had a few communication problems throughout the semester. No serious quabbles here.

Yes, four, but no sample answers. Sample answers are not really necessary for the practice exam, so don’t fret.

3 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture.

“Living in the environment”. Text book is not essential, but there are some really handy passages, and it is good for practice questions. Lecturers will often refer to parts of the textbook, and reading this bits gives a clearer understanding of course content.

1 x 2hr tute and 3 x 1hr lectures/week

2014 S1

HD