This course aims to teach you to think logically and critically. It covers a broad range of logical concepts and terminology, including argument, premise, conclusion, inductive and deductive reasoning, validity, soundness, and strength. You will learn how to evaluate good deductive arguments through the study of categorical and truth functional logic, and good inductive arguments using a probabilistic framework. Finally, you will learn about common fallacies (rhetorical, statistical, and psychological), how to avoid them, and how to clearly communicate where fallacious arguments go wrong.
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Year Taken: AY20/21, Sem 2
Grade: S/U lolAmount of content and quality of the lesson varies weekly, but overall excellent videos and presentations by prof. Towards week 6 things get very hectic so beware!
Two online quizzes and one final exam. Quizzes were tricky. Additionally the timings for it are arbitrary even if you started late. I went technically 23 minutes over time because I was rushing from a class right before. But even though I did it allocated time limit I lost 20 marks (capped).
Final exam was 100 marks. 20 marks for true and false questions. 80 marks for four 20 mark essay prompts. Not too hard if you learned your content. However, its hard to gauge how you’d score. Even though the essay is 20 you can only write about a page and a half of content. No past papers available for practise. But, the prof is nice and gives some questions, although they are not similar to the questions tested.November 30, 2021 -
Year Taken: AY19/20, Sem 2
Grade: A+I missed STAR wars (because I didn’t pay school fees) so this was one of the GERPEs left for me to do. This course that aims to promote logical thinking was taught by Dr Mary Salviaggio from School of Humanities. It covers the components of making an argument and the types of fallacies that you should avoid committing.
Quizzes | 17/20 (15/15)
There are a total of 4 quizzes, 5 marks each, assessing you on the topics that were taught 3-4? weeks before. To get the maximum marks, you only have to score a total of 15. So, if you have gotten full marks for the first 3 quizzes you could just void the last one. However, this isn’t an easy feat as the questions are pretty tricky despite it being MCQ, so don’t be complacent.Term paper
This was supposed to be finals, which was cancelled so it was replaced by a 1300 word paper. We were required to write an article/ op-ed review and analyse the arguments made by the author. Naturally, I wrote a review against a climate change denying op-ed.This review was reposted with the kind permission of Roy. Originally published at https://djtangent.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/eess-y1s2-2020/
June 11, 2021
