I think it has gotten a bit better from last year BUT it is still not a very good unit. The topics are very random and the subject doesn't have any cohesion as a whole. The reflection posts also didn't have any marking criteria (?????), and when we questioned this we were told to just "be creative" and were given advice that made the already poorly written assessment question even more confusing. I'm not giving it one or two stars because some of the topics were genuinely kind of interesting, and reading academic articles closely for the reflection posts did give me more of an understanding of literary theory...

Anonymous, Semester 2, 2022

First off good luck to future students who have to take this class as a compulsory unit. This is by far the worst class I have taken at uni. I understand that this was the first year this class was being taught but for how continuously hyped it was I am shocked at how terrible it ended up being. Here is hoping they manage to make some serious changes for next year. The biggest issue with the unit was the way the assignments were structured. Each module required a reflection task but you only needed to submit 3/4. The one you didn't submit you had to write about in your final essay. The problem with this was the reflections were due after their respective modules and we didn't have access to the essay questions until after module 2. This meant that students were either locking themselves out of or into a questions without any knowledge. Even if we had access to the questions from the start, we would still be choosing blind as we had minimal knowledge of future modules. Feedback for assignments were also pretty insubstantial, the medieval assignment I literally received three comments. One telling me not to cite the lecture which seemed strange given I was reflecting on the lecture and the other two simply said "how?".Also the main ideas of this unit were authorship and literary value but this was very rarely established in the lectures. If it was touched upon in the seminars was really dependent on whether you had a good tutor. Luckily in the Shakespeare and Pauline-Hopkins unit I did (shoutout to Ruby Kilroy and Daniel Dixon) but this was more of the exception rather than the rule. Also don't expect to actually be studying the content of texts rather the physical nature of them. This was especially terrible in the medieval module where 2 hour seminars were spent translating medieval english. Again what does this have to do with authorship or literary value. Talking to a lot of students over the semester none of them felt this unit was what it had been advertised to be. I really hope that major changes are changed, however, given that these issues were raised to the coordinator with minimal response makes me doubt this

Anonymous, Semester 2, 2021

Abhorrent unit that has unfortunately been made compulsory for english majors who begun their degrees from 2021. I took this unit voluntarily so the people who will actually be *required* to take this unit wont experience it until next year. Let me tell you from now that this is the most disjointed and most terribly organised unit i have ever come across. Awful communication. Felt zero connection to course. I dont even understand the relevance of this subject, I learned nothing that made me think "Ah so THIS is why its a must for all english majors". Just plain AWFUL. Minimal communication most of the time from the subject co-ordinator. Maybe they will change this terrible unit next year so that it actually becomes somewhat decent, but first impressions? TERRIBLE!

Anonymous, Semester 2, 2021