BIOL30001: Reproductive Physiology

-weekly online quizzes due during the semester (35%);
-a 50 minute mid-semester test in week 6 (10%);
-a literature review of no more than 1000 words due week 9 (15%);
-a 2-hour written examination in the examination period (40%)

I did this subject because I wanted to do a physiology subject (I hadn't done one before and thought it would be beneficial). My major is

Exam consisted of multiple choice (1 mark and 2 mark questions), define the word things (like "luteal cell", oogenesis, spermatid etc) and then you have to answer 2 long answer questions. One from two different sections, but in each section there are 4 questions. It covered all the content that had been taught, including stuff from before the mid sem. The MC questions are not as specific as the ones in the quizzes, because you don't have the luxury of having your lecture notes in front of you.

The long answer questions were really quite general. To revise for these questions my friend and I tried to think of some broad questions they might ask, that incorporates many of the themes in multiple lectures. I think one of the ones I answered in the exam was like "How is reproduction manipulated in cows?" or something along those lines, and it was really quite good because I could draw on information from like 5 or 6 lectures, haha.

Yes, with screen capture. <3333

Geoff Shaw, Mark Green, and many guest lecturers.

On the whole the lectures were really well formatted. Everything that is on the slides is relevant information, and I felt that the lecture content was just enough for the time we had.

Mark and Geoff were amazing lecturers, and I always looked forward to the lectures they presented. However the guest lecturers were really hit and miss.. mostly miss. They often had heaps of lecture slides with crazy amounts of information, most of which we were expected to know. I'm grateful that the most confusing guest lectures (Implantation and DNA modifications) were not covered in detail in the exam (I think at most they were MC questions with only the easiest concepts from the lectures included).

I understand it's probably because the guest lecturers aren't as used to teaching as Mark and Geoff are, which sucks because they obviously have a lot of knowledge and they are evidently trying to condense years of research into a 1hr lecture.

Lectures were always recorded.. we only had issues when the Echo recording system went down, and even so Mark and Geoff got us an older recording to listen to.

The mid sem was much harder than expected. It consists of MC and some define the word type questions. The word might be "Chorion" and you should be able to write a lot on it (2-4 points). My mid sem involved having to label the reproductive system of a tammar wallaby (which is in the slides). Other people had to label other things.

The literature review was a bitch. You are given a paper and you have to do your own research into the topic that the paper covers. It was a bit vague about what was expected, and so many people ended up doing badly. My topic was on "Alternate pathways of virilisation" and I think I looked up like 15 papers.

My advice for the lit review is to super study the original paper they give you. Know this paper off by heart, I'm serious. I made a table with a summary of the important points for every section, which really helped me understand what went on. I would also study the diagrams and figures, since we were expected to label a diagram in my lit review test. There was also a question in the lit review on disorders of sexual development, so you should know your lecture content too.

I really didn't like the lit review because it was so much memorisation and I think only 1 of the papers I studied became relevant in my answers. Maybe I studied the wrong papers but with minimal guidance it's really not too far fetched to expect that I studied the wrong thing.

The online quizzes were much harder than expected, especially the first few. For the first few quizzes I would highly recommend some group study, working with friends (or on your own) to go over your understanding of the content. It may seem frivolous to do this for a 5% assessment, but the early concepts are built upon for the rest of the semester so it;s worth it to get a good understanding of the basics.

You can have you lecture notes out in front of you so I would highly recommend you have them out.

As the semester goes on the quizzes definitely got easier. In the first few I would get 50% but in the last few I got more like 80-90%.

Use up ALL your time. Don't rush, take your time with each question to make sure you get it right.

No. Sample exam only with a few practice questions. They would go through the questions in one of the final tutorial.

2/5

tl;r

Interesting content, hard to succeed in. If you're looking for an easy subject to get good marks in, STAY AWAY.

Didn't buy a textbook.. maybe I should have.

Tutorials are held sporadically throughout the semester, like maybe once a fortnight. They were useful in that you can ask questions about concepts and lectures to Mark and Geoff and they will go over them for you, which is incredibly useful. In all honestly I think I only made it to one of these tutes, because of timetable clash, but they were still really good to listen to.

I think if you plan on going to the tutorials, you have to have some questions ready to ask and you have to be willing to ask them in front of the class.

Contact Hours: 36 lectures and 6 tutorials

Semester 2, 2014

H3