Module Review: EE2012 Analytical Methods in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Introduction  

This is one module I can honestly said I screwed up badly. It's the first time I gotten below B for a core module and cried for the next 12 days after seeing my CAP nose dive because of it. 😂

This is essentially a repeat of statistical portion in H2 Maths (which I also didn't do well). Permutations and combinations, probability distributions, hypothesis testing; that sort of rubbish. Maybe it's just me, but I hate these kind of statistical stuff and prefer calculus type of math you know??? 

Because it's considered 'easy', the bell curve is very steep every year. So please tread carefully and don't be a casualty of the bell curve! One thing I don't get is the existence of this module. The ECE department should have outsourced this module to the Department of Mathematics or something. This module isn't recognised by anyone else in NUS, hence cannot fulfil any prerequisite from the mainstream ststs modules the rest of NUS takes! From AY19/20, it will be re-coded as EE2012A with a reduction to 3 MCs. My guess the syllabus will remain largely similar. 

Lesson format

There are two lectures and one tutorial every week. The lessons are extremely boring, but are recorded. However, there are graded lecture quizzes after every chapter, so be careful. Remember, I suck at statistics and literally had no idea what the lecturer was talking about. For the first half, he was just describing PowerPoint slides instead of teaching!!! Seriously, no annotating, examples or anything. I think even I can teach better!! 

I guess someone complained and he started to write on the slides later on which was an improvement. However, since the lessons can be draggy, attendance rate plummeted as the weeks goes by. 

Graded components

This module is graded in very odd ways. You have 1% for participation, 2% for tutorials and another 2% for lecture quizzes. Honestly I have no clue how these were graded. I did not attend tutorials but according to my friends who did, attendance was not taken. You also have to complete a pair software project using Matlab to simulate an exponential distribution function, which can be completed in less than an hour. This is worth 15%. Again, marks wasn't released and I have no clue how I did for anything which was annoying!! Midterm is 20% and was ridiculously easy. The questions were something like "if John flipped a coin ten times, what's the probability of head". I got full marks and so did almost half the cohort. The finals (60%) was also considered 'easy' but somehow I got wrecked real hard. 🤔

Additional remarks

After getting full marks for midterms, I totally shutdown from this module. If you ask any EE students, year 2 sem 1 will probably be the craziest year because you will be occupied with mad EE2028 and EE2027. Not helping was EE2028's final exam was scheduled the next day after EE2012. So the choice was fairly obvious after weighing whether to concentrate on this (which I got full marks for midterm) or fail the crazy EE2028 thing. 

For someone who never studied, I think the paper was easy except for one or two parts which I just blanked out. That caused me to drop several grades and became the worse EE module ever. I think this is sibeh sia suay as well. If you mention you didn't do well for EE2027 or EE2028 or even some of the Engineering maths modules, I think many can relate but if you get below B for this, people will start to distance from you. 😔😔😔

The worse thing is this shit cannot be S/U-ed as well. Felt really 'sia suay' when I saw the results hence I did not write anything about this module until now. But for the large majority, an A- or a B+ is very common. Don't be like me. :(