GET1029 / GEX1015 - Life, the Universe, and Everything Review

GET1029 / GEX1015

Taken in: AY21/22 Semester 1
Lecturer: Dr Michael W. Pelczar
Tutor: Liu Jiachen

Grading:

• 10% - Tutorial Participation
• 10% - Tutorial Attendance
• 40% - 10 Weekly Quizzes
• 40% - Final Exam

---

This GET module is also the exposure module for Philosophy. Each week, you'll be briefly introduced to concepts in Philosophy, and there is a weekly quiz on each week's topic. Topics initially consist of morality (Right and wrong), but later weeks expand into God, existence, etc.

Honestly, this module was a lot of fun with a super low workload. All you had to do was an MCQ quiz each week (You had 1 week to attempt it, and you're free to discuss) and tutorials are discussions of the week's topic. The web lecture was also OTOT and viewable in 2x speed. The readings help but some week's readings don't really add much.

Definitely recommend! It's really good to clear the General Education Thinking pillar or the Humanities pillar (For FASS students). I also got to learn some of the common concepts in Philosophy, and started to question my existence in the process. Try to take this module with friends or actively discuss with others, as the quiz questions can be tricky, but they're still not impossible to do on your own.

---

Detailed Breakdown

Lecture and Tutorials

There were no live lectures. Prof Pelczar uses pre-recorded web lectures, some were recorded more than a decade ago. The lecture timeslot is instead used for QnA on the week's topic (Which I've never attended). You're expected to watch the lecture for the week, read the readings, and the next week's tutorial will cover the lecture topic. (Week 5 tutorial will cover the lecture of week 4, this also means there is no Week 13 lecture)

During tutorials, you discuss questions related to the topic. Each tutor has a different way of going through things; my tutor posed questions that had some relation to the quiz of that week. Some may also accidentally drop quiz answers if probed well enough. If he's still teaching, you can go for Yong Teck's tutorials as he's quite well-organized. He also found his way into our module's telegram discussion chat and he helped greatly with our quizzes.

You get 1% for attending a day's tutorial (10% - 10 days). This means you can afford to skip one day. Uhh... Honestly, tutorials are only 1 hour so this 10% is free for grabs. The other 10% is for active participation. I took an 8 am tutorial and it was not very conducive for discussion, but I know I've secured my participation score for being one of the only ones awake to discuss philosophy. LOL

Note: There may be some differences between how Prof Pelczar teaches this and how Prof Loy teaches this. From what I know, Prof Loy's module may have more components like a group presentation or something. My seniors recommend taking this module under Prof Loy (Usually sem 1), though I still preferred this self-paced version with NO group project (!!!!!). I heard Prof Loy won't be teaching this module for a while, though. Up to you if you want to wait.

Quizzes and Finals

There are weekly quizzes with 8 questions each. The questions are either True/False or multiple choice. For multiple choice questions, you can pick more than one answer, but you only get the mark if you pick ALL and ONLY the right answers. For the past few semesters, quizzes were open for one week, free for you to discuss and change answers up until you submit it. This sem's final also followed the same format, except it's 2 hours and has 40 questions (Duration and No. of questions may vary). The past few finals have been open book.

I had no issue with the quizzes as there was a telegram groupchat where we discussed the questions. It makes a big difference.

Final Note

Feel free to ask me for any past year content. I mostly got above average for quizzes and the final based on the grade distribution which was published on LumiNUS.

Expected grade: A

Actual grade: A+

Reviewed by: ZH