Your report has been successfully sent. We will look into it.
Rate and review your past subjects or read reviews and ratings of subjects you are considering taking.
Visit the Counter Course Online subject search page to get started.
Need some assistance? Visit our Counter Course Handbook support and information page.
Molly on HIST20068 The French Revolution
Stay updated with our newsletter: freebies, events and more!
03 8344 6966
UMSU Inc
Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung Country
Union House, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010
4 Comments on POLS20008 Public Policy Making
The best subject I've done. The structure was fantastic, with each tutorial focussing on a case study and the readings for it were very easy to engage with and thorough in their explanation. I wish I'd kept them! All of the case studies too were recent and close to home enough that they were relatable and most class members had connected with them in some ways already, whether they lived through them and had been part of the debate (eg. lockout laws) or remembered them faintly from childhood and their cultural impact. I thought I understood many of the case studies already, but I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did, and examining them through a critical lens really contextualised them better and linked them to theory and our political future. Scott is a fantastic lecturer and tutor, and when I asked for advice on an assessment task he was really helpful. I really got a lot out of this subject, and recommend it to everyone interested in politics, sociology, and modern events. Very worth putting in the extra effort to engage.
One of my favourite subjects ever! The lecturer and tutor Scott has worked in Canberra as a public servant and his experiences and humour made lectures very interesting. Really grounded in real life applications with the assessment and clearly linked to historic policy decisions with implications that continue to affect policymakers now. Tutorials are centred on a 'case study' about a certain policy such as taxi industry reform in Victoria or Federal sports funding. The readings were very easy to understand and were therefore very accessible, making for informed and involved debate in tutes. The assessment tasks were also really great. They both involved us researching and writing a policy proposal. We had to format them to resemble real life government policy reports and we got to try out this activity both in the role of a public servant and a partisan political adviser. Nice break from standard Arts essay writing.
Pretty good subject, it'll give you quite a good understanding of about 10 public policy issues. The only issue is that the assessment is structured so that you will only be assessed in one of the case studies, which means you're assessed only on a small amount of the content (a lot of people wouldn't see this as a problem though). Some of the guest lecturers are very interesting, as is the main lecturer.
Did not enjoy. This subject had 3 different modes of delivery; videos, lectures, and tutorials. The content from each of these parts does not overlap at all. The lectures talked about one set of things, the videos focused on something else, and the tutorials were completely unrelated and didn't offer any support. For the assessments you pick one week and make a policy about that. Pick your week at the start and work hard on it, rather than trying to learn about everything if you want to do well. If however, you don't like theory, this is the subject for you.