Requirements to Pass this Unit

To pass this unit you must:

• Achieve a total mark equal to or greater than 50%

Late Assessment Submission Penalty

Please be aware that we have adopted the Faculty policy on late submissions of assignments.

Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, a 5% penalty (of the total possible mark) will be applied each day a written assessment is not submitted, up until the 7th day (including weekends). After the 7th day, a grade of 0 will be awarded even if the assessment is submitted. Submission time for all written assessments is set at 11:55 pm. A 1-hour grace period is provided to students who experience a technical concern.

Assessments where Late Submissions will be accepted.

• Assignment 1 due date: week 4 - Yes, standard Late Penalty applies
• Assignment 2 due date: week 8 - Yes, standard Late Penalty applies
• Assignment 3 due date: week 13 - Yes, standard Late Penalty applies

Special Consideration

The Special Consideration Policy aims to support students who have been impacted by short-term circumstances or events that are serious, unavoidable and significantly disruptive, and which may affect their performance in assessment. If you experience circumstances or events that affect your ability to complete the written assessments in this unit on time, please inform the convenor and submit a Special Consideration request through ask.mq.edu.au.

Classes

Lectures: Students enrolled in this unit are required to watch the pre-recorded lecture recordings on weekly basis. Also, students are required to read the Module notes.

Unit content: The unit is divided into 7 modules, summarised in more detail below. Each module will involve 2 weeks of study, except for Module 7 which is only for 1 week, and generally includes the following material:

1. “Module Notes” describe concepts and methods, and possibly including some exercises of a more “theoretical” nature.
2. Sometime, “Selected Readings” from published articles or textbooks will also be included.
3. One or more “Extended Examples” illustrating the concepts/methods introduced in the notes and including more practically oriented exercises.

Study materials for all Modules are downloadable from the eLearning unit site. Assignments and supplementary material, such as datasets will be posted to the unit site. Please note that we may not be able to post copies of copyright material (for example journal articles and book extracts)—for these you will have to rely on resources from your home university’s library.

Recommended approaches to study: Students should work through each module systematically, following the module notes and any readings referred to, and working through the accompanying exercises. You will learn a lot more efficiently if you tackle the exercises systematically as you work through the notes.   You are encouraged to post any content-related questions to eLearning, whether they relate directly to a given exercise, or are a request for clarification or further explanation of an area in the notes.  You should also work through all of the computational examples in the notes for yourself on your own computer.

Outline solutions to the exercises in each module (except those to be submitted for assessment, as described below) will be posted online at the midway point of the allocated time period for the module.  This is intended to encourage you to attack the exercises independently (or via the eLearning site), and yet not make you wait too long to see the sketch solutions.

Technology Used and Required

The software used in this unit STATA. For Macquarie Uni students, Stata can be downloaded for free from the university through the following link: https://students.mq.edu.au/support/technology/software/stata

Communication

We will communicate with you via your university email or through announcements on iLearn. Queries to convenors can either be placed on the iLearn discussion board or sent to your lecturers from your university email address. 

Questions about administrative aspects or course content can be emailed to the coordinator, and when doing so please use “SVA:” in the Subject line of your email to assist in keeping track of our email messages.  Coordinator/s will be available to answer questions related to the module notes and practical exercises, and to address any other issues that require clarification.  However, please note that instructors are not necessarily available every day of the week and you should expect that it may take a day or so to respond to questions (possibly longer over weekends and during breaks!).

We strongly recommend that you post content-related questions to the Discussions tool in the eLearning site. In 2022 we are using the Learning Management system hosted by the University of Sydney and Macquarie University.  You should already be familiar with the university student learning system from previous units. 

COVID Information

For the latest information on the University’s response to COVID-19, please refer to the Coronavirus infection page on the Macquarie website: https://www.mq.edu.au/about/coronavirus-faqs. Remember to check this page regularly in case the information and requirements change during semester. If there are any changes to this unit in relation to COVID, these will be communicated via iLearn.

We value student feedback to be able to continually improve the way we offer our units. As such we encourage students to provide constructive feedback via student surveys, to the teaching staff directly, or via the FSE Student Experience & Feedback link in the iLearn page.

Student feedback from the previous offering of this unit was very positive overall, with students pleased with the clarity around assessment requirements and the level of support from teaching staff. As such, no change to the delivery of the unit is planned, however, we will continue to strive to improve the level of support and the level of student engagement.