COMP4920 - Second Essay Questions
Term 1, 2025 - UNSW
Conditions - Closed book - No notes, written materials, nor electronic
devices of any kind may be used whilst writing your answers to the Second
Essay in-class. Your tutor will bring copies of these questions to your class.
Due date - Week 10 - in class.
Time allowed - One hour and fifty minutes (1hr 50min).
Word limit: No official limit per se. Aim for quality over quantity. A ball
park of 200w per answer would not lead you astray, but there is room for
variation here.
Please submit your essay in person as you leave your tutorial room/lecture
theatre
Please include your full name/names and your zID on the front page of your
answer booklets (to be distributed in class).
Answer all of the following eight (8) questions separately:
1. What is the difference between explainability and interpretability? In what
ways might XAI be helpful or unhelpful?
2. We can remove discrimination by removing all group membership infor-
mation from the dataset (for example, by removing gender data), and the
model would become fair to different gender groups. Similarly, we can
remove information about age or race. Do you agree or disagree with this
approach of fairness through unawareness? Why?
3. What does everyday leadership development look like? Give an example
(either actual or counterfactual) from your Group Project in terms of
Positive Organisational Scholarship. In your answer, place yourself in the
role of hypothetical Group Project Manager.
4. What is ethical principlism? Is it useful, dangerous, or both? Why?
5. Why does Munn claim that AI Ethics principles are meaningless, isolated,
and toothless? Is he correct? Why?
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6. What are the Menlo Principles? Which type of normative ethics might
be used to justify each of the principles? Why?
7. Assume Nihilistic Error Theory. How might the moral education of com-
puter science students then proceed?
8. What are the risks and opportunities for our understanding and practice
of moral responsibility given the rise of automated weapons systems in
particular, and automated decision-making systems in general?
This is the end of your questions. There are no more questions.
1 Second Essay Grading Breakdown
The Second Essay is a hurdle task. A grade of CN in the second essay will result
in a grade of CN for the course. The breakdown of the grading thresholds for
the second essay is as follows:
• CN - Less than four answers at either CO or CM level.
• CO - A minimum of four answers at CO level.
• CM - A minimum of four answers at CM level, no answers at CN level.
2 Marking Guidelines - Competency Grading
The criteria for the competency grades of CN, CO, and CM are as follows:
• (CN) - Not-Yet-Competent. A grade of CN demonstrates a failure to
grasp the elementary issues relevant to a competent answer. Reliable ways
to receive a grade of CN are to not answer the question at all, to get even
basic definitions very wrong, or for the essay to not actually make any
sense. Other ways include failing to give sensible reasons for your claims,
failing to have a logical structure, and so on.
• (CO) - Competent. In order to achieve a grade of CO, you need to
answer the question(s) and give sensible reasons for your answers. You
must anticipate objections to your reasons, articulate them, and articulate
your responses to these objections. You must demonstrate a proper grasp
of the course material. In your essay question answers, you must engage
with the relevant course material at the relevant points in such a way for
it to support the points that you were making. To go even further, you
might reconstruct complex points and arguments from the literature in
your own words and with considerable clarity.
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• (CM) - Competent with Merit. All of the above qualities for a grade
of CO, plus your essay question answers contain convincing arguments
not anticipated easily by a marker, and makes genuine, novel contribu-
tions to the issues. This might be achieved by having demonstrated an
extraordinarily subtle analysis of the relevant issues, or by having read
and understood a wide range of relevant literature that you discovered as
a function of your own research, or by a combination of the two.
3 General Advice:
• If you have not started on your first drafts already, then get going! Then
revise the drafts as many times as you can before you sit down to write
the Second Essay in Week 10. Essays left to the last minute are usually
obvious (and not very good).
• During your in-class writing up of your answers, try to not spend more
than 12 minutes or so on any one question! Running out of time is
fatal.
• You may write in the first person if you wish.
• You are very welcome to pursue further research into the literature on
relevant areas. Please do be sure to use peer-reviewed academic sources
(and not random magazine articles or videos etc.).
• Give reasons for the claims that you make, and back up claims about
other people’s claims by referring to the relevant literature and citing it
properly.
• Read your drafts out loud to yourself. Trust me, you will spot a bunch of
opportunities for improvement that you will not spot otherwise.
• A short sentence is a good sentence. English does not like long sentences.
A long sentence in English is a bad sentence.
• Practice, practice, and practice. Get good working drafts up for each
question that you can write out in 10-12 minutes. Revise them critically.
Summarise each of these in point form and memorise the points. Practice
reconstructing the information that bridges these points without looking
at notes.
END OF DOCUMENT
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