PHYC10007: Physics for Biomedicine

25% allocated to the 8 practicals throughout the semester.
15% for weekly MasteringPhysics assignments that are computer based.
60% end of semester examination.

Okay, I haven't seen a review for this subject so here goes.

This subject was very, very demanding, particularly since all the students involved had no prior physics experience (barring cheekiness). Started off fairly slow and easy but once a few weeks had elapsed the pace really picks up. You end up covering an insane amount of content; kinematics, forces, energy, fluids, thermal physics, waves, electricity, magnetism, atomic physics and radiation, all in the space of 12 weeks.

The first half of the course was taken by Martin Sevior, who is no doubt a very nice fella. I just felt that we weren't being 'taught' as much as were being 'told' with Martin. It was simply a matter of reading the slides. Thankfully Rob Scholten took a slightly more dynamic approach. He was more interactive with the students and more enjoyable to try and learn from.

The practicals were decent, albeit there were too many. Eight is really overkill, especially when biology consists of five and first semester chemistry has only six. Nonetheless, it what a pretty easy way of securing at least 20 of the 25 marks available towards your final score. They also swapped demonstrators after 4 practicals to ensure there wasn't any bias or inconsistency between the groups in terms of marking.

Nonetheless, I have nothing nice to say about the MasteringPhysics weekly assignments that are computer based. I absolutely dread having to do any sort of mathematical calculations on the computer, and the fact that you have to type your answers correctly using all the right symbols was extremely time consuming and frustrating. One wrong symbol such as incorrectly using a capital letter would results in lost marks. Again, not huge in terms of your final grade, but quite annoying.

The weekly tutorials/problem solving sessions were fairly helpful when I turned up. I'd recommend you attend the sessions and see whether you find them beneficial or not prior to completely ditching them. Attendance is taken though, not sure whether that meant anything...

The exam was quite difficult, the standard was higher than the previous year and probably the few years before that also. Many obscure questions and Rob loves his rubidium and will always find a way to include some of his research into his questions. There was an analogue of a previous year question on the exam, so make sure you go through every past paper provided on the LMS and complete them.

Unfortunately, due to the amalgamation of two semesters worth of physics into one, which apparently was a decision driven by students a few years ago, the subject is quite dense. I don't really blame the lecturers for the fast pace, they are doing their best to complete the content in a semester and prepare students optimally for the GAMSAT. Since this is a compulsory subject (for students with no physics background), you simply have to deal with it.

Yes, with screen capture

Martin Sevior took the first six weeks and Rob Scholten took the remaining six.

Yes, with solutions provided from 2008-2012.

3.5/5.

The prescribed textbook was College physics: A strategic approach. I don't buy textbooks purely because I can spend the money better elsewhere, but having the eBook/PDF was certainly beneficial when concepts were very rushed during the lectures, which was often the case.

Three lectures a week, 8 practicals throughout the semester each lasting 3 hours, weekly tutorials (problem solving sessions) that last an hour.

2013, Semester 2.

H1

Ongoing assessment of practical work during the semester (25%); ten weekly assignments (10 x 1.5% = 15%); a 3-hour written examination in the examination period (60%).

Satisfactory completion of practical work is necessary to pass the subject (i.e. attendance and submission of work for at least 80% of workshop sessions together with a result for assessed work of at least 50%).

Physics is a tough subject for people to teach, and for people to study. The first 2-3 weeks weren't bad in my opinion, I thought I would actually like the subject. We were taught about kinematics, motion, forces, and energy. If you've done specialist maths before then it should be a piece of cake for you. If you only did VCE Maths Methods then you'll need to practise on adding up vectors and the like (and other trigonometric identities such as the double angle formula - which, funnily enough, wasn't even mentioned in the lectures and came up on a past exam!).

After this brief period of calmness, we moved onto Fluids in week 4. Everything started going downhill from this point. The lectures move very, very fast. You'll probably cover a chapter or two in two or three lectures. The department is trying to cram all of high school physics AND some first-year uni physics into your head, so they really have no other option. Yet they manage to leave out Optics, which you'll have to self-study for the GAMSAT, which will probably be the only reason you'll ever need Physics if you want to get into medicine.

You will be constantly bombarded with new material and you will continue to remain somewhat clueless even in week 12. The other topics you cover from this nightmare onwards will include thermal physics, waves, electricity, magnetism, quantum physics, and radioactivity.

You'll have weekly assignments on the LMS to do every week, which just consist of a bunch of questions to answer from a company called Mastering Physics. The assignments are usually harder than questions in the textbook and the past exams and usually test concepts which you may not have learnt. You can actually easily google for most of the answers, so you should get a high mark for the assignments if you make an effort.

You'll have a lot of practicals as well. 8 practicals in the semester, covering pretty much almost every topic that you've learnt. You'll have to write up a practical report in your lab logbook, and in it all you do is answer questions in the lab-book and paste in all of your graphs and results. During the practical you also need to complete "checkpoints", in which a demonstrator just asks you to interpret your result or answer a question. The demonstrators range from lenient to harsh. Some demonstrators will freely give out 9s and 10s, and others will give out 6s and 7s. Your lab marks will however be scaled according to your exam mark though.

Tutorials are helpful, and generally consist of a masters student going through several problems on the board. However, we rarely got to actually go through all of the questions on the sheet.

Now, onto lectures. Some things were not explained very well; some things were explained too casually and too simplistic. For example, learning about the second law of thermodynamics, the lecture notes just said "entropy is unusable energy". And there's a lot more to it than that, really. The lecture notes aren't also that great to be honest. There are also demonstrations in every lecture which is pretty cool I guess, but it also sucks out a lot of time. Sometimes the lecturers would fall 2-3 lectures behind.

I had to resort to reading the textbook and looking up videos on Youtube in order to get my head around everything. Khan Academy and Brightstorm explain things in much better terms. Half of this subject is just plugging in numbers and battling with units, really. If you know the units, you can pretty much derive any formula to do whatever you want. Be conscious of working in SI units all the time though.

The practise exams seem to follow a similar pattern of questions from 08-12. There will be a single question on every topic you covered, but at least the questions tend to be fairly similar year to year. The exam solutions for the earlier past exams suck though. They don't have any working out, which is a good and bad thing, and instead of giving you answers they'll be like "Justification required. Sketch required. Explanation required" on the solutions, so make sure you compare your answers with other people. From 2011 onwards the solutions get much better though, although there's an error or two in some of them.

The 2013 exam was a bit different compared to past exams, they actually switched the content of the questions around (although there was still one that was copy pasted from a past exam). Make sure you review all your lecture notes as well. However, the exam was still manageable given that you did enough questions from the textbook (they'll expose you to more new questions)

What makes this subject so tedious is the fast pace, the high numbers of pracs, the difficult weekly assignment questions and the lecture notes. The questions aren't too bad, if you know which formula to use.

Yes, but you'll miss on some of the demonstrations in the lectures if you don't go. Not that you're missing out on too much anyway.

Martin and Rob. This year, Martin taught for for the first half of the course, and Rob taught for the second half of the course. Keep in mind that in previous years it was the other way around when you do exams.

Yes, past exams stretch back to 2008.

2.8 out of 5

'College Physics' by Knight. The lecture slides have a list of questions you should do from each chapter. They're a must-have I guess; studying physics is all about doing more and more problems. You'll have to find the solutions on the LMS though, since the textbook only has solutions for odd-numbered problems. Later in the semester I downloaded 'Physics' by Giancoli, which had a lot more similar problems and also came with entire worked solutions for the whole book. Was much better than 'College Physics' in my opinion, but you'll have to only focus on the content that you've learnt in lectures.

Contact Hours: 3 x one hour lectures per week; 1 x one hour tutorial per week; 28 hours of practical work (8 x three hour laboratory sessions and up to 30 minutes of pre-laboratory activity) and 10 weekly assignments of 30 minutes each during the semester.

Semester 2, 2013

H1 (83)