This course aims to equip students with the philosophical foundations necessary to understand theories of ethics and subsequently apply those theories to real-life scenarios and issues. It also aims to enable students to critically assess the civic institutions that structure their local and global communities. To these ends, the course will examine the nature of ethics, its understanding across different cultures, and how it is manifested in concepts, social structures, and governance institutions. Topics to be explored include human rights, democracy, freedom of speech, inequality, and sexuality. The rights and duties of citizenship shall be a unifying theme. Students will think through assumptions they hold on all of these matters. They will be provided with the tools to understand various and even contradictory perspectives on these important issues.
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I got an A-…at what costs?
This is too much work for a 2 AU mod. Weekly lectures are 2h long, and on top of it we must still complete discussion questions, minimum 200 words on your views and minimum 100 words to reply to other peers’ views. Moreover, we have a debate and an essay to complete, and tutorial class discussions were too advanced for me (I hope it’s not just me).
Let me elaborate on how the debate works. Your group of around 7 people will be split further into two teams. You get the debate topic two weeks before the debate itself and you are supposed to prepare for it. The debate will be held in class and contains two rounds of opening, rebuttal and counter. Between each segment, you only have a minute to come out with a response, and your response is 5 minutes. Clearly, this is an impossible task. However, in the middle of the module itself, when some groups have done their debates, an announcement was made to disallow collusion: two teams working together for the successful flow of the debate, due to academic integrity. Please ask 3/4 lecturers/tutors of CC0003 to come out with a 5 min response together in 1 min. Let’s see how it goes.
Essays are maximum 500 words. You need to write your view, come up with a rebuttal and counter the rebuttal, much like your debate. Also, please ask a lecturer/tutor of CC0003 to write one such essay without lacking elaboration and substantiation, ‘provide supporting data and evidence for the claims’ and not be ‘entirely inadequate’. There is just so much you can write in 500 words.
Thankfully, I tide through this module with a decent grade. Please improve on course planning, assessment criteria, clarity and work load, for the future freshmen taking this course.
January 8, 2022
