As usual, Darren is an absolute goat. His Statistical Mechanics lecture series was fantastic and the assessment style was similar to his other units. The unit is split 50/50 between Darren's Stat. Mech. and Mikhail's Condensed Matter Physics. I found Mikhail's lectures hard to follow at times since there was so much content that was covered in each lecture, but thankfully he's put a lot of work into his comprehensive lecture notes so re-reading and taking notes from those proved to be a more helpful method of learning. The CMP test and exam questions can be quite hit-or-miss though, they tend to be more qualitative than quantitative (which is unusual for physics units) and thus you either know the answer or you don't. Despite this, they're marked quite leniently and Mikhail rewards anything that shows an understanding of the physics, rather than being strict on wrote-learned answers. Although PHYS2001 isn't a prerequisite I'd strongly recommend doing it first since quantum mechanics underlies basically everything you'll do in this unit, even if it's not directly assessed material. The labs are much better than in PHYS2001 though, you do just 6 labs between weeks 3 and 9 for participation marks, and then do a formal lab report that is due at the end of semester on a randomly assigned lab from those 6.