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Interesting Stories
• TABL3755 - UNSW's stance on taxation? - James Ji 16/9/2021
• Courses with multiple (separate) enrolment rules? - James Ji 22/9/2021
In 2019, 2020 and 2021, TABL3755's conditions for enrolment was stated as:
Prerequisite: LEGT2751 or TABL2751 or LAWS3147
Here is the 2022 version. The condition is now:
Prerequisite: LEGT2751 or TABL2751 and LAWS3147
But this is physically impossible because searching LAWS3147 in the handbook shows that it no longer exists as a course.
Maybe this is UNSW's way of telling us that TABL3755, "Taxation of Business Entities", is actually useless in the real world since businesses would NEVER abuse tax loopholes anyways 😆
One day I was looking through the conditions to try and see which pattern to incorporate into the algorithm next when I saw that SENG4920 had the following information:
SENG4920: {
"original": "Prerequisite: COMP2511<br/><br/>",
"formatted": "COMP2511"
}
This was weird seeing as a month ago, I had to submit a request to waive the UOC requirement since I was 6UOC short of the 144UOC required. I went back and checked the UNSW handbook for 2022. Notice how under "Conditions for Enrolment", there are 2 lines:
Completed more than or equal to 144 UOC in SENGAH, BINFAH or COMPBH
Prerequisite: COMP2511
So where did the first line go?
After some poking around in the data, it turns out that for some reason, this course had multiple separate conditions or "enrolment_rules" as they are called in the raw data.
{'active': 'true', 'academic_item': {'value': 'SENG4920', 'cl_id': 'acfc2344db79bc90be4672f5f3961967', 'key': 'code'}, 'type': {'label': 'Enrolment Requirements', 'value': 'info'}, 'order': '0', 'cl_id': 'a8fc2344db79bc90be4672f5f396196d', 'description': 'Prerequisite: COMP2511<br/><br/>'}
{'active': 'true', 'academic_item': {'value': 'SENG4920', 'cl_id': 'acfc2344db79bc90be4672f5f3961967', 'key': 'code'}, 'type': {'label': 'Enrolment Requirements', 'value': 'info'}, 'order': '1', 'cl_id': 'acfc2344db79bc90be4672f5f396196d', 'description': '<br/>Completed more than or equal to 144 UOC in SENGAH, BINFAH or COMPBH<br/><br/>'}
Don't worry, the thing just came unformatted like this.
Here is what the handbook looked like in 2019 for reference. Notice how the rule was slightly different back then?
Prerequisite: SENG3011 and completion of 144 UOC in SENGAH
Normally you'd expect whoever was editing the handbook to simply replace SENG3011 with COMP2511 and append ", BINFAH or COMPBH" to the end of the text like a normal human would. However, whoever it was, decided to create an entirely new entry to let students know about the change. No, not just a simple line break, an ENTIRELY new, SEPARATE entry in their database. ??????????????
Now, why would UNSW do this apart from sabotaging my sleep schedule so I miss my GP appointment tomorrow? 🤔 I have two theories.
SENG4920 (equivalently, COMP4920) was a compulsory course on Ethics and Management which CSE students must take to graduate (and is infamous for that 11 page student complaint google doc which I will not link here because I don't want to get sued 👨💼). Notice that I said "was". After UNSW swapped to the Trimester system, it became increasingly difficult to cram content into a shortened 10 week term. Despite struggling to do so in 2019 and 2020, the decision was made to drop the "Management" aspect of the course entirely, offloading it to SENG3011 instead. This is also where the handbook condition changes since without "Management", it no longer made sense to have SENG3011 as a prerequisite.
SENG3011 is often taken by students in the final year of their degree. As a result, regardless of the 144UOC requirement, students could only do SENG4920 in their final year. However, by replacing it with COMP2511, a starter level course, (not too sure why this was done, there is literally 0 relation between the two courses), the only thing really holding students back now is the 144UOC requirement.
In order to take SENG4920 in T3, it's possible for someone who fully loaded every term to meet the UOC requirement in their 3rd year of their 4 year Software Engineering degree (3 courses, 18UOC per term for 2 years and 2 terms = 144UOC). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone was stuck at home in lockdown with nothing to do except to study, taking on a full load of courses each term. This was exactly my scenario and I ended up with 138UOC heading into the final term of my third year. After planning out the rest of my degree in the pre-circles era, sifting through the available courses in the handbook page by page like a savage, I concluded it was best to take SENG4920 now instead of later. I emailed the Nucleus to get the 144UOC requirement waived and I'm suspecting a lot of students did the same.
It could very well be that the UNSW handbook people predicted this influx of UOC prerequisite waivers and decided to keep it stored as an entirely separate entry in the database to make it easier to waive in their system 🤯.
Someone went and removed SENG3011 as the prerequisite and forgot to replace it with COMP2511. Then later on, they went to replace it and accidentally created a separate new entry.