A great subject, poorly taught. The lectures are conducted by professors from a variety of different fields, ensuring diversity of viewpoints. However, the main lecturer, though he was a good speaker, constantly went off on irrelevant tangents, often spent half the lecture waffling on, and then expected us to download the giant lecture slides and finish the lecture off on our own time. Not cool. The tutorials were interesting enough, but often didn't relate to what we were studying. The readings were also interesting, but there were so many of them, and they were so long that I eventually just gave up. I think it was mostly the research I did by myself for this subject that I got the most out of. The final assignment has a bunch of different topics to choose from, and each of them is really interesting. Also the text I read for the book report, Clive Ponting's "A New Green History of the World", is a great read in general, well-written, factual and very eye-opening. Most of what the subject teaches can be found in there, so if you're on the fence, just read the book rather than take the subject.

Interesting subject, mostly just general history such as evolution. However there is a HEAP of reading for each tutorial, I'm talking at least 50 pages per tutorial week, but skim over these readings and you should be fine. One of the major assignments requires you to read an entire book for an 800 word assignment. Read the first few pages of the book, got bored, wrote the assignment and got a H2A just from 100% pure bullshit. If you're wondering whether this subject is easy, it's not. But it's not super difficult either.

I found this subject boring nd repetitive. The content in the lectures were almost completely pointless and the lecturers were almost always boring to listen to. The tutorials were decent but having to read through 2 or 3 20 to 40 page documents was too much considering it was a breadth subject. The only thing i enjoyed was the final assessment where I could actually focus on some aspect of the course.

I enjoyed this subject. My tutor was absolutely wonderful! A lot of critical thinking involved and drawing connections in tute discussion. Overall, quite a stimulating subject with fair assessment.

You don't really need the recommended book, if you want to read it there's a copy in Baillieu but I went the whole semester without it. Science students (esp. 2nd or 3rd years) be warned, the 'science' part is basic Year 10 high school stuff, so don't go in expecting anything super stimulating in that department. Then again, you can say one sentence about convergent evolution and sound like a genius, so maybe that's a plus. It was fairly basic, I literally spent maybe 6 hours tops actually working on this subject the whole semester once you take away procrastination time (inc the final research paper) and got an easy h1, great gpa booster if you need it.