I found the unit to be very engaging. The lecturer Ivan is very passionate about the topics and financial maths in general, which helped me engage in the topic and helped me enjoy the unit more than my other ones. The content itself is difficult but rewarding too, once you fully grasp a concept it unlocks the next part of the unit, and that cycle keeps going up till the very end of the course. With this in mind, its important to stay up to date with the lectures as I fell behind at the Chapter 3 mark and it made it quite difficult to catch up to the relevant chapters before the second mid-semester test. The part I found most challenging was Chapter 9, which was the Black-Scholes derivation and questions based on it, and this was similar amongst my peers.

Again, the lecturer Ivan is very passionate about the topics and financial maths in general, which helped me engage in the topic and helped me enjoy the unit more than my other ones. The lectures were a mix of theory and examples, where it often was the case we would go through half an hour of theory, then we'd attempt Flux questions (the attendance questions) and Ivan would then go over the answers, then we'd continue with the lecture. The lectures were recorded but sometimes it wouldn't capture the work Ivan would do on the chalkboard, so attending in person is better and more reliable. You could have managed without the lectures as long as you stuck with the unit's PDF, but it was often worth watching the lectures as Ivan would go into greater depth into the content, giving explanations of the why behind the content rather than just how to apply it, which I found to be very helpful for the final exam.

The tutorials were necessary to attend in order to get the 5% attendance mark towards your final grade. The best preparation for them was just to be up to date on the content as enough time is usually provided to complete all the questions in groups. The questions are released before the applied classes, usually on the Saturday morning before the next week of classes, but I found just looking through them to see what content will be in the applied was sufficient preparation. There were applied questions given, which despite being harder than the tests and exam questions, were very good in testing my ability/understanding of the content due to their difficulty, and often extended my thinking enough to where once I got the test or exam questions, I felt ready to answer them. There was no material solely covered in the tutorials, all content assessed is found within the unit's PDF notes.

The assessments were very fair given the material. Preparation typically included taking notes on the PDF, going through the exercises and redoing the proofs within the PDF notes, going over the applied questions for the relevant content as well as the homework tasks too. It also helps to do timed practice because the time-limit for the assessments is quite tight, meaning you need to be good at reading a question and understanding exactly the process needed on how to solve it/prove it. Marking was slightly harsh in the first mid-semester test, but the second mid-semester test was more lenient. Marking was detailed and gave enough information to help you fix the mistake for next time, and we were always welcome to ask our tutor about why a question was marked a certain way or where we went wrong too. The homework tasks were very lenient in marking, even if you got a wrong answer you could still get full marks as long as you're work showed a genuine effort and had a logical train of thinking, as well as showed most working. Practice materials were not provided for the mid-semester tests, but there was three practice exams and multiple choice questions provided for the exam. The exam was roughly similar to the mid-semester tests, with less time-crunch due to the length of the exam but still needing me to know how to solve things quickly.

The exam was based on all of the weeks of content except for Chapter 1 and Chapter 6, which was only assessed indirectly. It was a closed book exam but we were allowed an A4 cheat sheet of which we could write anything on. It was a no calculator exam too, but a calculator is not needed for the type of questions in the unit. There was some time difficulty, but if you know the material well enough you could finish the exam with an hour to spare. The exam was roughly one question on Chapter 2, one question on Chapter 3, one question on Chapter 4 and 5, one question on Chapter 7, one question on Chapter 4, 5 and 9, and one question on Chapter 4, 5, 8 and 10.

Tips would be to stay up to date on the content, ask for help with anything you have trouble understanding as both Ivan and Pierre (the tutor) are great at explaining things, and do lots of timed practice with applied questions, past homework tasks and past exams. It also helps to revise on integration, basic ordinary differential equations, and probability rules like expectations, variance formulas and moment generating functions, especially for a Normal distribution.