UNIB30005: Living Longer: A Global Diagnosis

Quite a few assessment tasks make up your final mark
15% wiki
20% weekly blog entries
15% tutorial attendance and participation
50% final essay

Overall this subject was a solid choice for students looking for an "easy" breadth. However if you are not confident in your writing skills I don't think this breadth would be the best choice, since 85% of your final mark came from your essay writing skills in one form or another.

There have been a couple of reviews on this subject already so I'll stick to the key points. The tutorial participation (15%) is supposed to be 10% for attending the tutorial (they take attendance) and then 5% from your contributions in class. However in the tutorials I don't think that they really checked who said what, or who contributed the most, so this is an easy 15% straight up provided you attend all the tutorials you are enrolled into (they are really strict about this).

The weekly blogs (20%) were pretty relaxing for me to write. They enforced a strict 300 word limit (don't go over this or they'll immediately dock marks), and each blog was worth 2 marks. There were 10 blogs to write in the semester, and each blog was meant to cover the previous week's material (e.g. Week 3 blog covered Week 2 lectures and the tutorial). As long as you make some connection with the topic discussed in the first half of the lectures (I didn't find the guest lecturers to be very relevant for the course), and you make a few critical comments and come to a conclusion, you can easily get 2/2 for your blogs (and hence 20/20 overall for this piece of assessment).

The wiki summaries (15%) basically consisted of you choosing ONE week only, and then finding and summarising an article relating to that topic on the LMS. The article cannot be from the weekly readings, so some research is required. For me, this exercise was also quite straightforward, since it was basically like writing an extended blog. They enforced a strict 500 word limit on the wikis, so try to keep within this to avoid losing marks for no reason. In the relevant tutorial you were also expected to present your findings. However the presentation isn't formal at all, as you just sit at your spot and basically summarise your summary in 30 seconds or less, so don't get too worried about this.

The last piece of assessment was the massive 50% essay. I found that it takes at least a week to write a good essay to the standards that they expected of you, so plan accordingly for this. For the research topic, you can basically choose whatever you want. The subject coordinators provided a list of topics on the LMS for you to choose from, which was what I did. However, if you choose your own topic you must run it by your tutor first to ensure that it is appropriate. Try to have a large number of references, I recommend at least 10 at the bare minimum, and closer to 15 is ideal. There was a strict 2000 word limit for this essay, and once again, any breaches of the word limit resulted in marks being lost (excluding references).

Overall this subject was a fairly relaxed breadth. I attended all the lectures, but although I found them to be quite interesting, they weren't all that useful in hindsight. Tutorials themselves were fairly laid back, and I found the discussions to be quite interesting, as students from many disciplines took this as their breadth subject, so we got a lot of different viewpoints. I'd recommend this as a breadth subject for anyone who is reasonably confident in their writing skills, due to its relatively low time commitment.

Yes, but audio only

Glenn Trembath, along with weekly guest lecturers.

N/A, no exam in this subject

4.5 out of 5

James C Riley (2001) Rising Life Expectancy: a global history (Cambridge University Press). Not sure how useful this book was. I never bought it, and I never read a copy from the library.

1 x 2 hour lecture per week, 1 x 1 hour tutorial per week (starts in week 2 and ends in week 10, but this might change in future years)

Semester 2, 2015

H1

I'll admit, they were a bit tedious during the semester and they would probably take about 40 minutes to write, but hey that's not bad for weekly homework! They are based on your understanding of the lecture material, your ability to ask questions/ engage in the weekly topic and provide your opinions. I scored the full 20% for them, as long as you show you are engaging in the material you will be fine. You did not need to attend the lectures to write these blogs, the slides can be used as a reference but it is always good to find other references to discuss (such as james riley's book)

10*300 word blogs due over the course of the semester (20%), 500 word tutorial paper/ wiki (15%), tutorial/online participation (attending tutorials and commenting on the class wiki page) (15%), 50% Research project (50%)

Wow, this was a fantastic breadth subject and was extremely laid-back. The subject is for anyone who is interested in observing the wide range of factors which determine life expectancy- sedentary lifestyles/ stress/ public health/ medicine/ pathogens... I'll make some individual comments about the running of the subject during the semester and the types of assessment.

Yes, with screen capture.

You could pretty much go off the lecture notes if you wanted to. I didn't write any real lecture summaries for this subject, I suppose that's what the weekly blogs are for. The fact that there's no exam is really good in the sense that you can write about a certain weekly topic for the blog and then never have to look back on the same topic ever again for the subject. Probably good to attend the lecture that you think you will be writing your essay on. The lectures are 2 hours long and one a week so they can be a bit draining.

No exam!!

4.5/5

Seriously, start this early in the semester! I'd say week 3/4 is a good time to start planning and finding references. The actual finding references part and writing key points about them is the hardest part because it is so time-consuming. It is due after swotvac but obviously with other exams it's wise to get the research paper done early. As opposed to my method of Writing pretty much the whole thing during swotvac (I did have all my references and points written down though), yeah that wasn't fun! You can choose from about 10 topics on what to write on and again these relate to the subject's weekly topics, for example I chose mental health and we had a lecture on it during the semester as well- this way you know some important areas about your chosen topic and what you might write about.

James C Riley (2001) Rising Life Expectancy: a global history (Cambridge University Press). I used it as a reference for some of my blogs and it was constantly referenced during lectures. You could go without it but the book does help.

Based on finding an article of your choice. The article must relate to one of the weekly topics during the semester. I chose nutrition as it is an incredibly broad area and analysed an article about obesity. Basically requires you to interpret what the author is saying and their main points, your opinions on the article- whether you agree or disagree (e.g. can you find other references to support this?) etc. If you take the article seriously and make sure it relates to the subject's overall themes and relates to the weekly topic then there is no reason for you not to get a H1.

Mainly involved class-discussions, we never really did any real work. They were pretty interesting and was a nice break away from other intense subjects during the semester. You had to speak about your 500 word tutorial paper and just give a couple of points about what it was about, nothing scary though.


IN SUM: DO THIS SUBJECT!

1*2hr lecture/ week, 1*1hr tutorial/week

Semester 2, 2013

H1