The University of Hong Kong

Department of Law

Academic Year of 2019-2020

Examiner’s Report

[This report will be posted onto intranet immediately after the release of exam results]

Course code: LLAW Course title: Computer Programming, Data-Mining and

6285 the Law
Date: May 29,
Report prepared by: Dr. Ryan Whalen 2020

Overall, I was quite pleased with the student performance this semester. As you know,
this was only the second time HKU has offered this class, and unfortunately because
the entire semester required remote teaching, many of the lessons we learned the first
time around were difficult to translate to this year’s offering. That said, the vast majority
of the class demonstrated a clear improvement in their ability to understand and write
code, and think about problems in computational terms.

The submissions for the final project generally met or exceeded my expectations. Most
students were able to provide insight into the questions that were directly posed in the
project prompt. Some students went above-and-beyond the question prompts by
providing further analyses, and this is where much of the grade variance came into play.
Those students that provided unique and insightful analyses tended to do a bit better on
the project grade. Other differentiators included the quality of the code, and
commenting. Some students internalized my exhortations to put code into functions,
and as such had cleaner and more-readable code. Others continued to code everything
globally. This isn’t necessarily wrong (indeed much of our practice involved coding in
this manner), but makes for more delicate code that is harder to read and maintain, and
is more error-prone.

The quality of the visualizations was also quite varied, but I readily admit that we didn’t
have much time to spend on visualization so I didn’t hold students to a particularly high
bar in this regard. That said, I was really impressed with the work many of you did in
thinking of creative ways to present the data.

Again, I was overall very impressed with the students’ final project work and their
participation throughout what I know was a challenging semester.