COMP4920: Management and Ethics

- Seminar participation (10%)
- Lecture summaries (10%)
- Movie Review (20%)
- Student seminar (20%)
- Essay (40%)

You're expected to be in the last year (or close to) of your computing degree. I strongly urge you to find a group of around 3-4 people you're comfortable working with before enrolling into the course because it's going to be a pain if you don't.

Oh man, where should I start? I'll probably start by praising the course for their efforts in improving the course from 2020's offering. Reducing the seminar participation from 20% down to 10% is a big win for the 2021 cohort because, otherwise, it's a battle royale of people just shouting answers as loud as they could. The lecturers (Stephen and David) couldn't be faulted, they were engaging enough to keep me going. That is all, onto the criticisms now.

The enjoyment of the course very much depended on whether you had a decent tutorial or not, whether your tutor enforced turning on your camera (thankfully my tutor was very laidback about it), and whether you could deal with students speaking for 5 minutes about absolutely nothing at all. About 50% of the course depended on the tutorial: 10% on the seminar participation, 20% on the movie review where you find your partner in your tutorial, and 20% on the student seminar where you find a group of 4-5 within your tutorial. So yeah, if you don't have a decent tutorial, you'll have a hard time with the course, which is why you should ideally do it with a group of friends so that the pain of enduring the course is shared among the group.

The course assessment structure was confusing. Lecture summary requirements were rather ambiguous. Wayne mentioned that the lecture summaries could not exceed one page per summary without any other description of page margins, font sizes (okay he said 9-11pt, but different fonts have different heights which drastically change the number of words), and font faces. When this was rectified, there was no major announcement and we, as students, are expected to find the updated change. This seems almost intentionally malicious but I'll believe that Wayne just forgot to make an announcement that a word limit was set. The movie review was pointless, the feedback was meaningless because it was vague. It was introduced just so that students didn't use The Social Dilemma as a reference for their essay. However, the structure of the movie review was just confusing. It was a mix of a self reflection and a review of the documentary in which the feedback wouldn't be relevant for the actual essay, despite Wayne saying so.

The marking seems a bit harsh and somewhat arbitrary. It seems like not many groups can achieve 17+/20 for the student seminar unless they do something extremely creative and out of the park. The feedback didn't really match the criteria and they were vague and unhelpful. Comments like "deeper ethical discussions" do not help unless you can pinpoint which areas required deeper ethical discussions and what constitutes as "deeper ethical discussion". One seminar tutorial should be dedicated to ethical argumentation and ways to strengthen those reasonings instead of looking at different scenarios (believe me, that's a good thing; we just have too many of those laying around right now). It seems like the tutorials are developed so that the tutors don't have do much since their comments tend to be short and unhelpful with the occasion "good point, [insert longer quote]".
Overall, I'm led to believe that Wayne has good intentions but I feel that he's a bit lazy which makes it seem like he's intentionally trying to fail people despite the fail rate being close to non-existent. With a change in administration, this course could have the potential to be really good. Ethical reasoning is always an interesting discussion but that can only be done when the administration is fixed. Tutorials should be tailored towards developing and strengthening ethical discussions and reasoning. Assessment feedback could be a bit deeper so that it's more helpful for future assessments.

- 2 hour lecture
- 2 hour tutorial

2/5, but this is difficult to judge because the marking seems somewhat questionable.

Yes.

- Course admin: Dr. Wayne Wobcke
- Lecturers: Dr. Stephen Cohen (ethical theories) and David Vaile (law)

Lecture slides are sufficient.

0.5/5

The prescribed textbook is Ethics for the Information Age but the course admin has said that it's a bad textbook for ethical argumentation soooo....

2021 Term 3

73 CR.

Prerequisites:

The content involves professional conduct, developing ethical arguments, and ethical perspectives, with lectures provided entirely by guest lecturers actually qualified in the area, excluding the first lecture introducing the course and its (lack of) structure. The guest lectures were actually interesting.

I'll keep it brief, but in short I despise this course. The following is probably very biased, but I encourage you to talk to past students and their experiences with the course. The course chat turned into a rant room against Wayne by the end of term, and almost no one I know was happy with their mark. I have heard that you can get this course replaced with an equivalent ethics course from another school or faculty. If you can, I highly suggest you do so.
Wayne Wocke (also referred to as Wayno, Wobkek, or Wobcuk amongst previous cohorts) is by far the most incompetent course administrator I have ever seen, and his actions (or inaction) come off as deliberately malicious. Many many complaints have been made against him, but UNSW refuses to replace him since "there's no one else qualified to take over the course." This term, it got to the point that the student representatives for CSE compiled a two-page document listing improvements for the course, after collecting 14 or so pages of complaints from students (there was a google doc we could fill with complaints, and it reached 14 pages before it was made private and they moved to an online form instead). A large amount of questions on the forum remain unanswered, and Wayne refused to acknowledge many questions asking to clarify assessment criteria. After being told that the quality of our contributions in class mattered, we found out that tutors were told not to give more than 2 marks of 9 or 10 out of 10 for participation, and some tutors used number of contributions to directly rank students. Within 2 hour, there is not enough time for 25 or so students to contribute to discussion sufficiently. There were several accounts of tutors acting unprofessionally, from ripping into a group for their seminar ("providing feedback") in front of the entire class, to asking what nationality a student was because their name didn't sound like a name typical of their accent. My tutor, Ali, was very chill, though our marking was still incredibly harsh. There was mention of 17/20 being the highest mark of seminar 1 amongst the cohort. 16 was the highest in our class. Tutors reported being told to reduce marks because their class average was too high. Considering 17 was the max mark, this sounds insane. There were a lot of questions on the forums regarding the length of the case study. Wayne refused to give an expected length, insisting that you should write an essay with "appropriate length", though mention of 2000 words was made at some point, so many took this to be satisfactory. By the end of the course, most were over the course, and putting in very little effort. The definition of what an "IT-related issue" was was not only vague, but misleading. Many of the companies provided as examples in the case study specification were not sufficiently IT-related for Wayne, and what was or was not considered IT-related differed between tutors, with many tutors providing contradictory opinions on which topics were IT-related. Wayne's actions throughout this course border on unethical. We discussed professional conduct in seminars, and Wayne is a perfect example to show that you can still get a job without caring for professionalism and competency.

1x 2hr Lecture, 1x 2hr Tutorial

4/5 (varies wildly depending on your tutor, and also whether you can lie your way through an ethical discussion well)

Yes; live but all recorded, but possibly only because COVID forced us online

Wayne Wobcke

Lecture slides available online.

-/5 (varies wildly between -500 and -5 depending on your tutor, and whether Wayne had a red or green apple today)

2020 T3

75 DN