BTCH30002: Trends & Issues in Agrifood Biotech

The Mid semester test (25%): This test is probably the easiest way to score marks in the whole subject as it examines the first 4 weeks of content and it is simply 5 of the tutorial questions from which you must answer 4. If you attend the tutorials and use the tutorial questions as practice, you will do very well on it.

The Oral presentation (10%): This assessment involves an oral presentation about a topic that relates to plant modification/genetic improvements and you do it in pairs. I felt like this is quite a subjective assessment and the tutor gave different marks to essentially the exact same presentation..However if you put effort into it you can score a 7/10 easily.

The Essay/Report (15%): This one was a bit more challenging, as it involved a lot of tedious research and graphs/analysis of results, etc. However, I'd recommend going to watch all of the oral presentations as they can help in developing your ideas for the essays.
The exam (50%): The exam was pretty much the exact same format as the Mid-Semester test except it examined all of the lectures . Again, I cannot reiterate how useful it is to attend all tutorials as the exam questions were just tutorial questions combined to form questions that require longer answers. Overall, there isn't much understanding involved in this subject, it involves just memorising pretty basic information and combining them into a coherent answer.

Yes, with screen capture

Professor Mohan Singh, A. Professor Phil Salisbury

Yes, one is available on the library website and many practice questions are provided

4 Out of 5

The subject content is broken down into three distinct parts, which are: Agricultural Biotechnology and plant modification techniques (Week 1-4),Gene editing for stress tolerance and biofortification (Week 5-7) and GMO's, including animal biotechnology (8-9,12). I found the part of the subject relating to GMOs particularly interesting. The 10th and 11th weeks have no lectures as this is dedicated to the oral presentations.

The lectures themselves can be quite boring at times because Mohan tends to drone on a little bit and is quite a slow speaker. However, most lectures (except the first few) finished in 1 hour or so. Later on during the semester, there are some guest lecturers who were more interesting to listen to. The tutorials however, have a 75% attendance hurdle and because there are 10 tutorials during the semester (not including one optional exam revision tutorial), you must attend 8/10 tutorials to pass the subject. Each tutorial consists of around 5 questions (based on the week's lectures) which you answer in groups and present to the class. I would recommend going to ALL of the tutorials, as the tutorials are the basis of the MST questions as well as the exam questions. They are also an extremely good summary of the lectures and definitely reinforce the content.

N/A

One 2 hour lecture per week (Only one slot, Monday 2:15-4:15 PM) which is more like 1 hour because the lecturer tends to ramble on and digress a fair bit, One 1 hour tutorial per week

2016, Semester 1

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