Academic Year 2023 - 2024
Semester 1

NUSMods Description

What is Science? How does it work? Why does it work? Not only will this course help answer these questions, but it will also hone the skills needed to negotiate a world in the post-truth era. These skills derive from the scientific method; the characteristic of modern science that has made it without a doubt the most successful endeavour in human history. These questions and these skills will be woven within a rich history of scientific accomplishment, culminating in an understanding of the frightening challenges we face to mitigate climate change and biodiversity loss.

Review

This mod tested on how stupid I can be. I did not do well for the midterms as I felt that the questions were just testing me on random things. The lecture videos were very long so I just x2 speed on Panopto. The lectures were divided into a few blocks. The first block focused on the scientific method, the second block is about climate change, the final block is about diversity.

I can appreciate the first and third block but I get very annoyed by the second block. It seems like just overloading a bunch of information about the climate situation and how bad science led to climate denials.

Lets go through the bad parts. I cant emphasis how much I hate Examplify. Midterms and Finals were held on that platform. I don’t think I did well for midterms (like 11/20 ish) maybe because I lost patience with this module. I actually put in effort in revising for finals. I compiled all the notes and the SG green plan into a single document so that it can be CTRL-F-ed very easily during the exam. I think I did pretty well for the finals.

There were labs for this class held in the Physics Department. Honestly, its just like Primary School lab classes (the first lab was on WHY THINGS FLOAT) and using the scientific method to find out why. Whatever, I made some nice friends from Year 1 then. The tutorials were quite fun too. It was very chill and as usual, I am the oldest.. I think my tutor is only 1 year older than me.

For one of our assignments, we have to go as a group to 1 x Nature Park and 1 x Nature Reserve to do field work. Hence, I had to burn 1 Saturday to do it. It was quite fun though, though my friend (girl) got attacked by mosquitos which was quite funny.

Overall, I did not like this module, and to be honest, any decent university freshman would have taken a science lab class before and known about the scientific method anyway. Whatever, I made good friends from Year 1 here.