CVEN90043: Sustainable Infrastructure Engineering

2 hour exam (35% - hurdle requirement), workshop attendance (10% - hurdle requirement), 6 executive summaries (25% - hurdle requirement), 10 minute group presentation (10%) and a major group assignment (20%)

Where do I start with this subject? The guest lecturers are interesting, but this is overshadowed by administration issues that plagued this subject throughout the semester. Firstly, this subject has a HUGE workload. In the first week, you're put into a group, and then you choose a case study to research over the semester.

Each fortnight you're also assigned a smaller case study to write an executive summary on, along with using a sustainability model to analyse the case study. These case studies will constantly interfere with the major case study, and technical glitches with TurnItIn meant sometimes waiting 1 month+ for feedback on the executive summary. There was also a huge amount of inconsistency in grading and advice often conflicted (i.e. being told to reference material, and then being told not to). The last executive summary was done in an exam-style setting, where a 398 document was given to students 4 days before earliest sitting of the case-study.

The 2 hour workshops would be conducted in a small-medium-sized lecture theatre that would sit roughly 50 students. Students would be expected to engage in active discussion (in order to be ticked off for one week) in such a large room, to the point that you'd probably only be talking for roughly 90s in the 2 hour session. These workshops are WAY TOO BIG for what they're trying to accomplish.

The exam was a 2 hour exam where you would have to answer 30 multiple choice questions, write an executive summary and use an appropriate model to analyse a question asked.
Bottomline, yes, the lectures were interesting. The subject is useful for anyone studying to become an engineer, but it was run terribly.

Yes, with/without screen capture

Prof Anne Steinemann along with different guest lecturers each week

No. Four sample multiple choice questions were provided, and outline of case study was provided.

2/5

No required textbooks

1 x 2 hour lecture, 1 x 2 hour workshops

2016, Semester 1

N/A

Despite only having one large assignment that carries on from ~week 2 to week 12, this subject has a litany of smaller assessment that’ll keep you fairly busy throughout the semester.

Perhaps the most prominent is the 6 case studies, where you’re given a week to go through a set of “case materials” (new articles, engineering reports and documents etc.) on an infrastructure project and address a few questions. While this seems fine in principle, the way that the case studies were handled made them more of a hassle than they needed to be. You were restricted to writing only one single-sided page as your answer to generally between 5-7 questions, which basically means no more than 100 words per question unless you intend on providing a magnifying glass to read the size 3 font. As you can tell by the length of my reviews, I tend to be pretty (and unapologetically) verbose, so I initially had some trouble fitting in an answer I was happy with within the one page limit.

But, after about the third case study, we were told that we were to answer it as just one flowing piece of writing – a mini essay essentially – rather than just address the questions. This actually made it a bit easier for me, but it would’ve been nice to get a heads up a bit earlier as this is apparently what they expected from the start.

Each of the case studies probably took ~2-3 hours to get your head around the materials and write a response, and many students (including me) complained that they were only worth 1% each, especially when the MST only went for 30 minutes and was worth 18%. (I’d expect that they’ll change this next year.) And for something worth 1% each, they were also marked pretty precisely (I won’t say harshly, as I think I’m a bit of a harsh marker myself); spelling, grammar, sentence construction and presentation are considered just as important as what you actually write.

Speaking of the MST, it was also a bit of a drag. Some of the questions asked were oddly specific, the sort of thing that was posted on a single lecture slide that was on screen for no more than a minute in passing. But the majority of questions were quite common sensical.

The other two pieces of assessment are the group presentation and group project. Here, you’re allocated into groups of 4-5 people within your tute group and given an infrastructure project (generally in Australia and relatively recent or ongoing) and asked to assess its sustainability, primarily using the “models” presented in the lectures. This is another thing that I wasn’t all that thrilled with in regards to the assessment: it seems that taking the obvious and somewhat banal approach of just running through the models is what gets you the marks. A lot of uni assessment is like this – where you just have to “play the game” – but I never think that such derivative analysis is all that useful or engaging.

(Note: there is a subject specific website that covers the majority of the models here)

Anyway, I had a solid group and we ended up doing pretty well for the final report (though not amazing for the presentation), but the mentality of this subject is kind of weird in that it tries to recreate this sort of stereotypically “professional” setting. When you give the group presentation, you’ll be expected to wear “business attire,” and initially, if you wanted to say something in the group discussions in the tutes, you’d be expected to stand up, as if it was the house of reps (this was eventually abandoned after they realised that it just stultifies the actual ability to have a conversation).

This subject is a lot different to the other first semester Master of Eng subjects. It’s primarily focused on written and verbal communication, as well as a good dose of critical thinking and engagement with real-world engineering infrastructure projects. As such, it’s a subject that some students (particularly international students as the subject demands high-quality written English to do well) struggle with and detest.

As the name of the subject isn’t particularly cryptic, you can probably tell what its about. “Sustainability” is the core theme that runs through the entirety of the course, and this is looked at with reference to (primarily) large-scale infrastructure projects.

This year’s exam was a little bit of a departure from previous years, with multiple choice questions and one extended response as opposed to simply having four medium length written response answers.

As such, this year's exam almost took as long to read as it did to answer. There were about 8-10 full pages of “case materials” to read, some for the multiple choice and some for the long-answer question.

Some of the multiple choice questions were a bit wishy-washy, and half of them were worth a full 3 marks out of 90, quite significant for a multiple choice that seemingly has a couple of potential answers.

The long answer question was quite straight forward, essentially the same process as you’d done with the 6 case studies throughout the semester, this one on the potential to constructive a massive facility to store nuclear waste in rural Australia. Again, you’re being marked on both what you say and the professionalism with which you say it (and many students detest it for this reason): this isn’t an exam where you can get away with dot points.

Yes

Predominately guest lectures (yes it's one of those subjects), but multiple lectures were given by:

• Meenakshi Arora (this year's subject coordinator (though she won't be next year apparently)
• Hector Malano

So as I mentioned, the majority of the lectures in this subject are taken by guest lecturers. You have Hector and Meenakshi that cover some of the core content of the subject that you’ll be expected to integrate into your case studies, assignments and exam answers. Then you’ll have a whole host of other folks from both academia and industry that speak about subjects ranging from cost-benefit analysis to governance to spatial data infrastructure to water resources and so on. While the majority of these lectures are well presented, the content is a bit dry and kind of obvious at times, and not all of it is going to be relevant to your assessment, so it can be pretty easy to doze off.

This isn’t going to be a subject that you’re going to put a ridiculous amount of effort into, but, as a bit of departure from the more quantitative subjects I did this semester, I didn’t mind the more discursive and qualitative approach that SIE offers. I might be the exception to the rule for engineers, but I love to write, so the critical assessment of written and verbal language in this subject didn’t phase me like it might to some others (particularly students where English is a second language). If this sounds like you, don’t be afraid to have a few consultations with the academic skills unit at the uni; they can really help you to improve you’re writing to a “masters level.”
(Man that was a long and boring review)

Nope (chuck testa)

3.25/5

None required

One of the tutors that some students who have done a subject in the from the geomatics department will be familiar with is Victoria Petrevski. She’s somewhat divisive as a tutor, but she’s ultimately really good at leading a tutorial and illustrating her (high) expectations for students. Her marking can be a bit nitpicky at times.

But unfortunately, her promise-keeping record rivals Tony Abbott, as on several occasions the prescribed timelines for marking and feedback were not kept. However, when the subject has only two tutors for a cohort of over 300 students, this is quite understandable. And though not much feedback is provided, it's probably more than most eng subjects.

David Wilson is the other tutor and is, by all reports, pretty good too, though an easier marker than Victoria.

1x two-hour lecture and 1x two-hour tutorial per week

Semester 1, 2015

H1