Module Review: EE2033 Integrated System Lab; and a little rant on the new Engineering curriculum 😊

This is probably one of the more enjoyable modules as you get to do it with friends, especially if you have friends who are those clumsy or clown type, making the experience even more entertaining during these depressing times. Since this was done during the Covid-19 period, this was also the only module I get to go to school physically. Every student in this module is given a bulky toolbox with scary looking resistors, opamps, antenna and other exciting items for you to “succeed” in EE2033. Yes, you must bring it to almost all the labs.

Weekly labs and quizzes

Before every lab, there’s a pre-lab to be completed at home and submitted online. Nothing too difficult, but then again, you can’t self-verify if your answers are right or wrong, hence having discussions with friends is important to secure as many marks as possible. (I will explain why this is essential later).

 

The weekly labs are kinda fun because we really build or tinker with all kinds of strange things. Labs 1 and 2 you will play with the transmitter/receiver device. The pace ramps up in labs 3 and 4 when you start to do Prof Heng’s portion on building filters (those EE2027 stuff). His labs are the most difficult, hands down. Labs 5 and 6 are about modulation techniques. Imo, it is extremely important to do this module with a group of (keyword: smart) friends because you can easily collaborate in the group setting to discuss on which components to use, or if the output make sense for example. Every week, you will always see the same group of people working together. I might be wrong, but those without friends in modules are struggling, especially for pre-labs where you have no one to verify with.

 

On why you must secure as good lab marks: The median and average marks for every lab is more than 90%. If you lag massively (consistently below 85% for each lab), there’s a serious possibility to get below a B+. Since almost everyone did this module with friends, the lab component is kinda like a giveaway. Even worse, some students even have last sem’s lab report from seniors. Although they try to change the labs requirements, the general flow remains largely the same, so these students have a huge huge advantage. So, to differentiate students’ marks, a total of 6 weekly quizzes are done during the labs. These quizzes, while open-book, are quite tough as you only have 10 minutes for 5-6 MCQ questions, and if you’re gonna waste time flipping through notes, you’re in trouble. Many students probably get excited and underestimate the difficulty of the quizzes when words such as “open-book” and “MCQ” are thrown around. It’s not that simple. The median for the quiz is below 60% for my batch. Even the instructor conceded that the quizzes are probably the heaviest deciding factor on your final grade, despite only weighing 20% of the total grade. Personally, I didn’t do well in the quizzes because I skipped all the zoom lectures. There’s a total of 4 dry lectures to watch. You probably can attempt the quiz without watching them, but it’s important to at least organise the notes and know exactly where to find information from.

Mini Project

Lastly, comes the mini project (40% weightage). (p.s. not important but I’m a little annoyed that the instructors spelt it as ‘miniproject’ without a space in between. Why?!?). The concept of the project is simple, you have two signals; a message signal and an interference. Build a filter to supress the interference. But it’s not as easy as it sounds. The best solution on paper is to build a four or five stage filter to attain the steepest roll-over for maximum suppression. The problem is you’re also marked on the costs of component used as well, hence it is key to strike a balance between the number of op-amp used and to maximise the suppressing. Most people will do the standard Chebyshev 3-stage filter and it works when you finally get the right values after many nights of trial and error. But then again, everyone filter will work, so to differentiate yourself, you need to tinker until you get extremely good performance with high PSR (packet success rate) values. At the end of the day, they don’t care how you build your filter as long you balance costs and perforamance. You can be revolutionary and use no op-amps at all saving lots of costs, and if you managed to get adequate suppression, there’s a high chance you will top the project. On the flip side, you can use many many op-amps for extremely good suppression, sacrificing cost. You will probably score below average. For my group, we did things a little different I won’t say exactly what we did (anonymity sake), but we are one of the highest in the cohort.

This scary thing is our mini project!

Little rant on the new NUS EE curriculum and why I like this module

It’s kinda a shame that the module will go defunct soon to support NUS Engineering’s new stupid common curriculum which is a big joke imo (EE2026/28 is now optional, you only need to two technical electives to graduate. I need seven. The list goes on. I probably can rant about it in another post if anyone wants, pls comment. Who is going to hire new NUS Engineering graduates, compared to someone from NTU EEE with deeper technical knowledge??). Anyhow…, whenever I go for internship or job interviews during year 3 (no FYP yet..), I always mention this when asked about past projects. Why? While the concept is easy to explain even for someone not in the technical field (like HR employees), and the execution of it is not (That’s why you are given more than a month for it!). You and your project partner will probably have differing views on how to approach it arising to conflict. But ultimately, we resolve the differences and collectively work on it, day and night as we slowly trial and error with different wiring, different filter types, different quantity, different components like op-amps and resistors… Finally, demonstrating the end product to the examiner one month later during the demonstration, attaining good output values while balancing both costs and complexity of the filter… It’s these kind of stories that will make interviewers go ahhhh... if you know what I mean… Not DTK1234… But too bad. I am not affected by this change so it’s not my business.

Grade profile and conclusion

I am gonna conclude with the most fascinating(?) thing: the bell-curve is extremely steep. Since all our marks are released on gradebook, together with my curious, bored friends, we concluded that the estimated raw marks for A+ is slightly less than 90, A grade is around 84 to 87? A- around 84-81? Around ~2.5% between each grade. It’s that scary. Of course, it very much dependent on the batch as well. So buckle up and have some fun! If there's one thing you can do to do well, I suggest you go source for your senior's lab reports! It will help a ton!

Final grade: A 😂