Subject Code/Name: BIOM30001: Frontiers in BiomedicineWorkload: - Contact hours: three x 1 hour lectures per week; plus six x 1 hour tutorials per semester; plus one x 4 hour practicals per semester.
- Total time commitment: 170 hours.
Assessment:- Continuing assessment (40%).
Unfortunately the handbook is very vague here, which I found quite frustrating at the start of the semester because I had little idea of what to expect. I'll go into more detail in the review, but the breakdown (roughly in the order in which they are to be completed) is as follows:
- Literature searching and bioinformatics assignment: 7.5%.
- Debate: 5%.
- Mid-semester test (held in week 6): 10%.
- Pre-practical quiz: 3%.
- Peer assessment: 2.5%.
- Respiratory assignment: 12%.
- One practical assessment (10%) - that is, a graphical analysis assignment (basically a report).
- 2 hour written examination in the final examination period (50%).
Lectopia Enabled: Yes, with screen capture.
Past exams available: Yes, four past exams are made available to practice both for the mid-semester test and exam.
Textbook Recommendation: On-line readings will be provided through the readings on-line site through the LMS.
I don't actually recall anything being put up though... Maybe I didn't pay enough attention lol.
Lecturer(s): There are too many to list here, because this is a subject where a lecturer may only come once or twice to discuss their particular topic. However, I've attached the timetable for the 2016 semester below for your reference.
Co-ordinators:
- Dr Rosa McCarty (Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics).
- Dr Terry Mulhern (Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology).
We only saw Terry at the very start and end of the semester, so I assume he does some work behind the scenes. Rosa, on the other hand, attends most of the lectures and as the face of the subject is likely to be your first port of call for help. She also takes a couple of lectures herself.
Year & Semester of completion: Semester 2, 2016.
Rating: 3/5.
Your Mark/Grade: H1
Comments: Sorry it's taken me a little while to make a start on this... Like a lot to do with this subject, I feel like I lost a lot of motivation and interest. Part of that has to do with the fact that it's the last semester of Biomedicine, but it also has to do with the subject itself. Apologies if my review isn't as long or detailed as my other ones have been (although maybe that will be a good thing haha).
Subjectively, I didn't enjoy this subject very much but objectively, I cannot criticise BIOM30001 as much as I thought I would have been able to. It still needs a number of improvements, but I think the reason why many people are not too fond of this subject has to do with the fact that it's just a very different sort of subject. This is a subject that is primarily concerned with developing graduate attributes and skills that will be of use in further study and employment, with the biomedical content essentially of secondary importance. This subject is not about taking copious notes of details during the lectures - in fact, I'm not convinced that taking notes would even be of benefit. It's more about developing a holistic overview of biomedicine in the community and understanding your position as a budding biomedical scientist. Instead, there is a massive focus on developing skills in the tutorials, the practical and the majority of the assessments.
There's no point me breaking down individual lectures and lecturers one by one, but I will take a moment to discuss the key modules of the lecture course. We started off with a week of largely non-examinable introductory lectures designed to help us understand this subject and what it's all about, and then swiftly moved into the first module: metabolic syndrome. This module spans for about 4-5 weeks and discusses topics including the obesity epidemic, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The second module only spans a week or two and discusses stem cell technology, including tissue engineering and some basic biomechanics. The mid-semester test held in week 6 examines both of these modules. Following these, we moved into respiratory diseases, exploring chronic pulmonary obstructive disease (COPD) and asthma in particular. This particular module also included some more general public health lectures including science communication in the media and public perception of vaccination. The last module, which began after the mid-semester break, is pain and pleasure. About half of the lectures are dedicated to the neurophysiology of pain, while the other half deal with pain treatments and drug addiction. Each module deals with topics beyond biomedical science, such as public health, politics and economics. In most cases, I felt the lectures were delivered to an adequate standard. I didn't think it was amazing, but for the most part it wasn't completely woeful either - ultimately, it varies due to the high turnover of lecturers. Perhaps the last module wasn't dealt with very well: a lot of people found it confusing. As a neuroscience student I found this really disappointing because we often had the same lecturers/lectures in our subjects and things were taught to a far higher standard. I even felt that pain in BIOM30001 was messing up my understanding of pain taught in other subjects. Annoyingly, some of the lectures (particularly a couple relevant to an assessment) were merely recordings from previous years rather than an in-person lecture and were add-ons to the three lectures a week. Another strong criticism from previous years was the lack of continuity or narrative between lectures. This was worked on this year and I thought it wasn't too bad. In fact, I even thought it may have been reasonable to integrate different modules together (i.e. not just integrating subtopics of different disciplines within the same module - despite never being required in the assessments). Nonetheless, we were still told that it was at least partly our job to link the lectures together. Given how we are assessed, it's probably reasonable to expect us to do this.
Unlike other subjects, the tutorials are generally not designed to supplement lecture content and build understanding. Rather, they are like a parallel channel in which most of the assessments and graduate attributes are managed. The lack of strong continuity between lectures and tutorials/assessment is a major criticism of this subject, since it almost feels like students are taking two different subjects under the one subject code. I understand that the staff want us to start thinking independently, and not simply regurgitate content from lecture slides, but for me the disparity was simply far too great. At best I could see weak links between the assessments and the lecture content, but with a little bit of tweaking it could be possible to make them relevant and help consolidate the information provided in lectures. This feedback was taken on board this year, so perhaps this will be changed next year. The tutorial rooms are available for the class each week, but the tutor will only come if an assessment needs to be dealt with (our tutor never came if the tutorial was marked as a "tutor drop-in" though). Otherwise, they were "self-guided" - some questions would be put up on the LMS and we could get together as a class and work on them together. While my tutorial was pretty diligent, and the questions were helpful in consolidating the lectures, in most cases attendance was poor, to the point where people stopped turning up to tutorials where assessments were handled. This was noted this year and is likely to be changed for next year.
Onto the meat of this subject - the assessments. As you can see, there are a lot of assignments to work on in the semester - you'll pretty much always have one to work on. This should be your primary focus in this subject. The first is given at the end of the first week and is a literature searching and bioinformatics assignment. This involves using journal databases and bioinformatics banks to find relevant information regarded a rare disease loosely related to the metabolic syndrome topic (this is an example where the link could be made stronger to make the assignment seem more relevant). Additionally, we were required to write about what we had learnt about this disease in both a scientific and lay form (with word limits) as a means to develop our skills communicating to both audiences. We also had to demonstrate an ability to appropriately reference other scientific research. It's not terribly hard to do well in, but I found it extremely difficult to figure out what to do (some of the instructions were vague) and how to navigate these websites. I felt as if the skills that were required were ones that perhaps should have been better introduced earlier in the degree, rather than tacked right at the end. Nonetheless, I did feel a lot more confident using these things by the end of the assignment. A couple of the lectures were designed to help with some aspects of this assignment, and were helpful to varying extents. One of the tutorials was also dedicated to discussing the skills relevant for this assignment. How useful this was largely depended on your tutor. Most people felt their tutor was hopeless (or didn't turn up) but mine was actually very helpful (and this applies to all the assessments). Perhaps I should've waited for some of these assistance classes before attempting the assignment.
Once we were done with that, we were then provided with the debate assignment. This is a relatively small assignment and required us to research points for and against universal health care (only loosely related to the public health side of the lectures - again somewhere where a slight tweak could improve this assignment significantly). We were given our teams in one tutorial, but not our side - so we had to prepare to argue for both sides until we found out on the day which side we had been assigned to. This assignment is primarily about participation, worth 80% of the marks. The content itself, and the delivery, was a secondary consideration and it was more like a casual round-table discussion than a debate. Given it is only 10 minutes a side (with each side having around five members), it's not terribly demanding either. Most groups do extremely well on this assignment, although our class was marked harshly (this happened to all of our assessments so they were scaled up).
It is probably now worth talking about the practical because most of the other assignment work is related to it. There is only one for the semester, but given the limited resources there are about eight repeats so your decision when timetabling will allocate you to one of these repeats. It is about four hours in duration and examines how the drug atenolol affects homeostatic responses to exercise. Again, this only had a very loose association with the metabolic syndrome and respiratory disease topics - perhaps some more time spent on these aspects in the lectures would have been welcome. After receiving some lectures/tutorials/supplementary information on informed consent (i.e. no one is forced to do or take anything they don't want to), people will get into small groups of which one will randomly take a placebo and another atenolol. The other group members are responsible for taking a variety of cardiovascular and respiratory measures both before and after exercise, and both pre- and post-treatment. I felt there was plenty of staff supervision around and everything was explained really well, so for me it was definitely one of my more positive practical experiences. A pre-practical quiz ensuring you understand the preparatory material and practical notes must be submitted prior to your class, although it is not very difficult.
Once all groups had finished the practical, we were required to write up our findings and present our results in a graphical analysis assignment. This was mainly a series of questions to be completed, although it mimicked writing a scientific report. This also wasn't too bad, although again I found some tasks a bit too vague for my liking - often we only realised what was required once the rubric came out, which was frustrating especially if you understood that information but had left it out. Again, support is provided through the tutorials. However, given we never covered the pharmacology of atenolol, this is something you'll have to learn the basics about yourself (just ask someone who has studied pharmacology - their basic synopsis should be enough). If you use any external sources, they will need to be referenced. Interestingly, this assignment is peer assessed: we were randomly given five people's assignments post-submission and were required to mark them out of 100. As long as students completed the peer assessment and did so with integrity, this was a free 2.5% to our grade. Most people marked reasonably well, generally correlating with our self-mark. The marking rubric was a bit vague though, and perhaps left too much open to interpretation. In some cases, I felt that good answers were marked lower than they should have been as a result.
Following this assignment, we were then required to complete a respiratory assignment that predominantly revolved around comparing our results with a UK Biobank cohort, in addition to tying in some public health knowledge as to what biobanks are and how the data relates to smoking. This assignment was still a little bit too removed from the lecture content for my liking, and was probably the most vague assignment of them all. For most of the assignment many of us felt we did not know what was actually required of us, much like the graphical analysis assignment. It may also be necessary to research some information independently and reference it as appropriate. There was a page limit of six pages for this assignment, including references. Again, one of the tutorials is dedicated to this assignment.
Now I might tackle the mid-semester test and exam together in one lot because their format is exactly the same. The only difference is that the mid-semester test is shorter (40 minutes), with one question on metabolic syndrome and one on stem cells. Conversely, the two hour exam has one compulsory question on each module, and additionally we were required to select two optional questions from a bank of three. Evidently, 20 minutes is given per question. The questions are very open ended and often require you to tie in several lectures within a module in order to synthesise a holistic response. You'll probably need to write more than a page in order to answer sufficiently. The mid-semester test in this format was new this year but it was extremely helpful gauging what was expected of us in the exam. However, despite having plenty of revision material (past exams and enough revision questions from the self-guided tutorials) most people, including myself, did not do very well on the mid-semester test: only 16% of students scored a H1. The staff were happy with the result (median approximately 66%) but I knew this was well below our performance in other core subjects. My advice is to have a look at questions as soon as they are available so you know what to expect and what level of knowledge is required. My mistake was that I was either being far too vague, or very specific but also disorganised in my thinking. The best answers were those that were well synthesised - they had structure such as an introduction and conclusion, and paragraphs that read very much of the TEEL structure drilled in during high school English. Basically, an answer that communicated key information clearly, concisely and effectively, with a structure and organisation that made sense, did better than an answer that had everything in it but was not organised well. To help for the exam, some exemplars of very good answers were provided on the LMS.
Overall, I kind of feel this subject is different to the point where it will be a love it or hate it affair. I didn't enjoy it, but I feel that the holistic picture BIOM30001 tries to create through the graduate attributes and multi-disciplinary lectures is admirable. However, I feel some aspects still require a lot of tweaking and integration. For example, a discussion board was put up for help with the assignments - while people were asking questions there weren't a lot of answers, and the staff only seemed to step in when they could the discussion was going nowhere. In a way, I kind of feel that's a bit of a surrogate for the subject as a whole. Some may question the point of this subject - if the graduate attributes are taught throughout the course, rather than lumped at the end, then the tutorials in BIOM30001 wouldn't be necessary. I didn't mind the lectures, so if it headed in this direction I'd be rather happy. In the end, this subject isn't as easy as it might initially seem. The results are quite comparable to BIOM30002, despite arguably easier content, because the staff are quite scrupulous in marking the assignments and tests. Based on my results, this will probably be the lowest score on my transcript, so I have my fingers crossed I've done just enough to get a H1 (it will be borderline though). Anyway, I know this review is rather sloppy but I just wanted to get it over and done with because now I don't have to worry about this subject again!