NM2103 - Quantitative Research Methods Review

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Taken in: AY20/21 Semester 2

Lecturer: Tabarez Ahmed Neyazi

Tutor: Ozan Kuru

Grading:

  • 20% Class participation
  • 20% Midterm quiz
  • 20% Review of extra readings
  • 5% Presentation 
  • 25% Final group report 
  • 5% Peer evaluation 
  • 5% Research participation
  • (Extra credit) 3% SPSS quiz

NM2103 is otherwise known as every CNM student's dreaded compulsory stats mod. Most seniors would advise against taking the three CNM core mods (NM2101, NM2103 and NM2104) together but I ended up having to that because ModReg refused to give me anything else. It turned out fine and I feel that they're actually quite complementary, because some content overlaps. All three have a week on ethics and the quantitative research mod mentions qualitative research and vice versa. What I would say is that you should definitely take NM2101 before, or at least at the same time as NM2103, as the project expects you to already have background knowledge on media theories in order to apply them to your project (and a pretty significant portion at that). For NM2104 (at least for when I took it under Prof Angela) it's fine because they don't really need any media theory knowledge. 

I don't really enjoy group projects because I had a horrible experience with my NM1101E (and PW back in JC lol) groupmates who didn't do anything but I'm glad to say my groupmates this time around were much better to work with. Considering how much time you will spend on this project you should pray for a good group LOL. I really hate stats and math and all that so lectures were always kinda mundane for me. I never watched a single lecture live because I just found it too difficult and time-consuming to listen to Prof Neyazi for so long... So I just waited for the lecture recordings every week to listen to on 2x speed. Towards the end of the semester when my assignments started piling up I stopped watching altogether because I thought they weren't very important anymore, especially since there were no finals. The midterm was pretty difficult and Prof Neyazi said that he was pretty disappointed with the results LOL... That's on him for setting such a hard quiz! (I scored 29/40 and if I remember correctly that was about slightly higher than the median?) The SPSS quiz was honestly the worst -- three tutorials are spent teaching SPSS. If you have a choice of choosing your tutor, please do not choose Prof Kuru's slot. I have nothing against him, but he is simply the least engaging tutor I have ever encountered. My tutorial group had only about 7 of us but no one spoke a word the whole time, either because we weren't paying attention or if we were completely lost. Once you miss a single step on SPSS, you're seriously gone because it's a series of steps that's not very intuitive imo. I was seriously dreading the quiz so much, I hadn't felt such an immense sense of trepidation for any test since my math test back in JC. I ended up scoring 3/20 and thought that was horrible but when I checked out the average it turned out to be around 4-5/20 anyway LOL so I knew I wasn't the only one struggling. Anyway I guess Prof Neyazi was expecting that cause in the end he sent us a "good job" email and said the quiz was for extra credit rather than part of the overall course grading.

I also feel like NM2103 had too many components. The group project which took up so much time turned out to only be 25%. Research participation was so tedious (some surveys were really long) for 5%. There were also two presentations (though only one was graded... annoying since it's double the effort for just 5%), one of which was held on the same day as the disastrous midterms for me. I honestly did not expect my grade at all but I guess it was due to the bell curve and my review of extra readings which I did not bad for. I barely spoke in class too so not sure how class participation turned out but like I said, literally no one in my tutorial group said anything during class lol. 

All in all, I'd say save a S/U for this mod if stats doesn't sound like your thing, though I suppose if you get good groupmates your project could pull you up. This is a compulsory mod for NM students so we really have no choice. The only advice I can give is to remember to take NM2101 before this! 

Expected grade: B+

Actual grade: A-

Reviewed by: M


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