Review: Deakin University
I studied in Deakin University Burwood campus for a trimester (they have the trimester system dividing an academic year in to 3 parts) from July 2023 to October 2023.
The Deakin Burwood campus it self has a modern look built with many facilities to make students life much easier. Even though I haven’t studied in Geelong campus, I had the chance to visit it a couple times and it is as same as the Burwood campus with bit more space and nice decent places to hangout. Both campuses can be accessible via public transport and has paid parking available on campus. If you want free parking around Burwood campus, Good Luck! It’s hard to find parking around Burwood campus and almost every road has restricted parking from 30 min to 2 hrs maximum.
My experience in Deakin university Burwood Campus as an IT undergraduate.
The campus has an exceptional student support service called Student Central and all the students can easily sort out almost all their problems related to campus life from here.
Both campuses, especially the Burwood campus has more international students than local students on campus notably from Asian and South Asian backgrounds. When it comes to the IT faculty, almost all the lecturers are from immigrant background and are either PHD holders or PHD candidates. Unarguably, most of them (some are apparently not, even I got confused how they got their PHD thing) are very knowledgeable on their specific field. But that’s not the point right! The real deal is how good their teaching and English speaking skills are. I know University teaching is different to the high school teaching and its more about self studying rather than being taught. But imagine if you are coming from a non native English background had 2-3hr lectures for each subject and your lecturers English speaking skills are sometimes worse than you. Trust me there’s zero fun in it. But I have to say there was this one female lecturer whose English and Teaching skills are top notch and she taught us Discreet Mathematics. Loved her lectures and got a High Distinction for that.
Assessment methods
Deakin follows an ongoing small assignment system through a platform called “On Track” rather than the traditional major assignment system. This is in fact a “less stressful” assessment style for students. Each subject has very small assignments due on each week throughout the trimester. Students are graded based on their marks for each small assignment in the end of the trimester. If you are after just a “pass” or a “credit pass” this is the easiest way. If you want a “Distinction or High Distinction”, you need to do bit of work. But compared to the other universities this is much easy. And the fun fact is, you can set your expected pass for each subject and do only assignments required for it. so technically you know what grade you are getting for each subject if everything went well. Of course, there are exams for some subjects but only very few. Ontrack is used in all the undergraduate degrees in Deakin and one of my mate studying an Engineering degree in Deakin Geelong campus confirmed me it’s the same for them too. And one of my relative who had done her Law degree in Deakin told me it was the same for her as well.
By Deakin University - Image taken from http://svgshare.com/i/3pp.svg, extracted from http://www.deakin.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/623145/LIVE-2017-2020_Sept.pdf, Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55784952
But even though this looks pretty good method, What’s the real deal? Well, trust me or not most of these assignments are available on internet and also there’s tons of doggy people out there ready to do your assignments for a small fee. If you are a real student, you know this is not funny eh. Imagine you’re working your ass off to get good grades and a rich stupid bastard would get the same grades as you (may be even higher) without doing nothing. The only thing they scared of are exams unless Deakin gives old exam questions rather than designing new ones for every academic year. With that kind of situation, imagine the quality of some of their graduates. Are they really professionally competent ??
How I felt in the end
In the end of my first trimester, I felt like I am in a Degree store, where you can technically buy the degree without doing very much if you have money. And the attendance wasn’t mandatory for most subjects and you will only see hand full of student in lectures after the second week of every trimester.
So, my final verdict isn’t very good about Deakin. If you are thinking about going to Deakin University. I hope my review will help you to rethink what do you really expect as a university student.