In general, you'll find that the "easiest" courses at HKUST tend to be the Marketing or Management courses. Here are my thoughts on the courses I've personally taken:
MGMT 2120 Business, Society, and the Individual
- 1 unit course that met for 1 hour and 50 minutes once every week for 6 weeks
- Instructor: Jinyu He
- Assessment breakdown:
- Participation 46%
- Personal Reflection logs (3) 54%
- Very easy discussion based course with no homework or reading aside from the personal reflection logs.
- The professor was mediocre. The material of the course focused on business ethics and was interesting, but he wasn't the best at stimulating discussions. He attempts to ask open ended questions, but more often than not, he already has a set answer he looks for.
- Easy A? Probably. Just don't skip class and you'll be fine. Skipping as much as one class period could drop your grade by a whole letter and a half because the average is usually really high for this class.
MGMT 2110 Organizational behavior
- Instructor: Jing Zhu
- Assessment breakdown:
- Exam I: 20% (80 points)
- Exam II: 25% (100 points)
- Group Project: 30% (120 points)
- Class Participation: 19% (76 points)
- Research Participation: 6% (24 points)
- Pop Quiz: 10 bonus points if all pop quiz scores are 100%
- The instructor is a fair and her exams are fair as well. I didn't find her class to be particularly hard or easy. It was just exactly what you would expect from an entry level course. The material itself isn't challenging and the professor likes to use a lot of real world examples, video clips, and stories to engage her class.
MGMT 3240 Negotiations
- Instructor: Stephen Nason
- Assessment breakdown:
- Exam 1: 35%
- Exam 2: 35%
- Negotiation results: 5%
- Negotiation quizzes: 5%
- Participation: 10%
- Attendance: 10%
- This my favorite course I've taken at HKUST by far. The professor makes the class super interactive with real negotiations every week and you learn a lot without having to do a lot. You don't need to buy the textbook, but I think having the textbook does help you negotiate better deals if you do the reading. The course content is practical and easily applicable to every day life.
MARK 3220 Marketing Research
- Instructor: Ralph Van Der Lans
- Assessment breakdown:
- Quiz 1 (best of 3): 100 points
- Quiz 2 (2nd best of 3): 100 points
- Participation: 40 points
- Group Project
- Presentation: 60 points
- Reports: 190
- Marketing Experiment: 10 points
- This class is quite work intensive, especially if you don't end up with a good group to work with. You'll essentially be writing a 25 page marketing research report, designing/implementing a research method strategy, and drawing conclusions through statistical analysis. You do all this in addition to studying for the 3 quizzes and preparing for your project presentation. It's a great class, but not for travelers.
MARK 3430 Global Marketing
- Instructor: Kristiaan Helsen
- Assessment breakdown:
- Class participation: 10%
- Pop quizzes: 3%
- Research credit: 2%
- Quiz 1: 10%
- Quiz 2: 35%
- Group assignments: 10%
- Project: 30%
- Interim (5%)
- Presentation (10%)
- Final report (15)%
- The class lectures can be slow and his textbook is dense and difficult to read. The material itself is interesting and the professor often draws on case studies around the world. He's actually a pretty difficult grader when it comes to the final project. Tip for the final presentation: He really really likes teams to have interactive presentations to engage the audience.
Course reviews pending....
MGMT 4220 - Entrepreneurship and Small Business Studies
ISOM 3100 - Business Simulation
MARK 3420 - Consumer Behavior
MARK 2120 - Marketing Management
Some light-load courses recommended to me by other exchange students:
CIVL 3700 - Engineering Geology for Civil Engineers
MGMT 1120 - Developing the Leader in You
MARK 1230 - Consumerism and Happiness
Other courses to consider:
- Operations management
- Introduction to Computing with Excel VBA
- GBUS 3050 - Deal Making in Asia and Emerging Markets
- This course is like the upper division version of MGMT 3240 Negotiations. Generally, GBUS (or Global Business) courses are known to be very competitive and rigorous but it seemed like a lot of exchange students took this course my Spring semester and enjoyed it.
