CITS1401 is a great unit that quickly introduces you to complex computer science topics and the Python programming language. While many people assume it should be a walk in the park and are shocked (especially in the age of AI) by the high proportion of in-person assessments, those assessments are actually one of its strengths. The unit encourages you to develop genuine understanding and coding ability rather than relying on tools, building a solid foundation that pays off later. The topics and content themselves are straightforward, just like any other introductory computer science unit, study the material early and consistently, and you will be fine.

The exam is completely different from anything else and you won’t be able to learn code from scratch. Avoid this unit and avoid UWA for computer science. It’s terrible an a very easy fail, 70% pass mark for competency test is weird enough and the final was worth 60% and trust you won’t be able to do most qs if you’re not naturally a technical person AT CODING. Steer clear of it completely

It was very mid and the lectures are super long and don't give you a lot of info. You can use AI and get 100 percent on the lab and projects, but you'll be cooked for the mid term in class test and final exam.

Worst unit. It wasn’t structured well. You need a computer for this unit.

as others have stated, boring lectures, useless lecturers, poorly written projects that take way too much time to complete, an unnecessarily difficult final exam that is weighted way too high, rushes through the difficult concepts way, way too fast. a joke of a unit. steer clear unless a core unit.

yeah do not take this as an elective if u have no coding experience and have no interest in python. the lectures were so boring. i did well on my assignments and labs, but they're worth so little and the final exam was brutal. and yeah project 2 was marked so late i still have no idea what i got. the final is 60% of our grade and i knew how to do like 1 out of 7 of the questions. i failed and missed the sup cutoff by 1 mark

Very much a by-the-book unit. You'll learn how to program in Python, and not much else. Will definitely leave most IT majors feeling rather bored/unchallenged, but that's first year for you.

Worst unit ever. If I were given a choice to give it 0 stars I would. My friends and I failed and we ended up changing our entire degree after this unit.

2024: This unit IS NOT BEGINNER FRIENDLY. I went into this unit with 0 experience in coding and thought it was for people with no experience. (Scratch doesn't count, btw.). I watched all the lectures and did all the labs. The labs were fun and really easy, and the lectures taught the bare minimum of Python. It is literally the equivalent of a free Python YouTube course. You can probably go without watching any of the lectures and just do the labs. However, the projects were very difficult. The first project was OK, but the second project was a nightmare. Though difficult, the projects were quite useful in teaching you how to sort data. Just... it was too much for beginners. I recommend you take a coding course before doing this unit. The final exam is closed book, and you are going to be coding on paper. (Super dumb). The whole point should be to test your own code.

This unit isn't that bad, only because I barely watched any of the lectures. The lectures I watched (first 5-ish) were pretty terrible, with the lecturer presenting the content in the most boring fashion possible, and spending more time trying to debug her code than I thought someone competent at Python would spend trying to remove the most fundamental errors. As someone with a little bit of other coding experience, this unit isn't overwhelmingly hard, but I'd imagine there is a sudden spike in difficulty - much time is spent going over the bare basics, with not much time spent on the harder topics e.g. recursion. Most of my learning came from the labs and just searching online. The projects themselves are fairly similar (reading information off a file and processing data) but the task sheet wasn't always clear on what it wanted - especially when the sample outputs for you to check your code against were initially wrong for both projects, so until it was corrected a week after release, it was confusing as to why your code's output didn't match. The exam was terrible - 60% of the grade being allocated to a closed-book, pen and paper exam. Whilst I understand an online exam would be pointless because of everyone using ChatGPT, the fact that you have to memorise most of the essential functions is insane - it is a completely different skill from what you have been practicing for the whole 12 weeks. For a comparison, it's like trying to do math, but you try and memorise every single number to do a problem. The exam is more of a glorified memory test with a bit of Python in it. Overall, a terrible unit. If you've been spared by having the option to do this course (instead of being forced to), please don't do this - it's simply not worth your time. I would rather be strangled by an actual python than redo the exam again.