Sessions
The twelve-week teaching schedule: when your tutorial runs, what happens in each session, and what leaves the room.
Each week's session runs once, but in four timeslots — pick whichever one fits your timetable and attend the same one each week. All four cover the same material, taught by one of three tutors.
Weekly timetable
| Session | When | Led by |
|---|---|---|
| Lecture | Monday, 10:00–12:00 | Elena Marsh |
| Tutorial T1 | Tuesday, 10:00–12:00 | Jonah Petrescu |
| Tutorial T2 | Tuesday, 14:00–16:00 | Anika Solberg |
| Tutorial T3 | Wednesday, 11:00–13:00 | Femi Adeyemi |
| Tutorial T4 | Thursday, 09:00–11:00 | Jonah Petrescu |
All four tutorial timeslots cover the same weekly session — pick whichever one fits your own timetable.
Reading the dates below
Every session and lecture below is dated to the Monday of its teaching week — that date identifies the week, not the day you attend. Your own tutorial runs on the day and time shown in the timetable above, in that same week.
Semester overview
Assessments are listed against their declared teaching week; see each assessment page for its due date.
| Week | Lecture | Tutorial | Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | The digits are a claim you did not make | The Right Number of Digits | — |
| Week 2 | A number is a chain, not a guess | Taking It Apart | — |
| Week 3 | The assumption you didn’t notice you made | Naming Your Assumptions | — |
| Week 4 | A range says more than a number | A Number With a Shape | Calibration Diary |
| Week 5 | Measured well, about something else | Borrowed Numbers | — |
| Week 6 | Disagreement is information | Conflicting Evidence | Client Estimate & Estimate Court |
| Teaching break — 5–18 April 2027, between Weeks 6 and 7. No lecture or tutorial. | |||
| Week 7 | Revision, and its imitation | The Number Someone Wants | — |
| Week 8 | What your estimates have in common | Ask the Room | — |
| Week 9 | Accurate on average is not the same question | Who Carries the Cost | — |
| Week 10 | The one thing forecasting adds | A Number About Tomorrow | — |
| Week 11 | What prose cannot force you to say | Estimate Court | — |
| Week 12 | One miss tells you nothing. Fifteen might. | Your Own Track Record | — |
Every Session
The Right Number of Digits
The first session — a published population figure resolved to the last person, and the four different questions its digits invite you to confuse
Taking It Apart
The one week you build a number out of nothing — and then discover that your number and the official one were counting different things
Naming Your Assumptions
A case file rather than an exercise — one 1957 estimate, one 1973 outcome, and the question of which assumption was holding the first one up
A Number With a Shape
A national agency publishes its uncertainty on purpose, in a grammar you can borrow — two numbers, a percentage, and a statement of what each one means
Borrowed Numbers
Almost every number you will use was collected to answer somebody else’s question — today you write down what stands between their question and yours
Conflicting Evidence
Two Australian agencies count homelessness and get different answers — the work is diagnosing which question each of them answered
- Teaching break5–18 April 2027 — no lecture or tutorial.
The Number Someone Wants
A real business case that came out below one, an evaluation that says exactly where the pressure went, and an hour spent finding out what you would have done
Ask the Room
Two rounds of estimates from the same people under two different protocols, and a national polling failure that has the same shape as the second round
Who Carries the Cost
A debt-recovery scheme acted on an estimate at scale, and the question that outlasts whether the estimate itself was any good — who pays when it is wrong
A Number About Tomorrow
Every target so far already existed. Today's does not — a dated commitment from the Reserve Bank, what happened instead, and a forecast you seal shut
Estimate Court
The written estimate and its disclosure are already submitted. Today a panel reads them, asks one shared question, and follows up on whatever it likes
Your Own Track Record
The whole semester's set of ranges, read together for the particular way you tend to be wrong — a shape no single estimate could ever have shown you