Subject Code/Name: BIOM20002: Human Structure & Function Workload: 6x1hr lecture per week, 4x2hr anatomy pracs per fortnight, 1x2h physiology practical per semester
Assessment: Written laboratory report (1000 words, 10%);
Two tests during semester (20% total, 10% each); and
Two 2-hr end of semester exams (70% total, 35% each)
Lectopia Enabled: Yes, with screen capture. I think I only went to a handful of lectures throughout the semester.
Past exams available: Practise exams of both papers are available from 2009-2010 on the LMS. The 2011 exams were on the UniMelb library page, as well as Paper 2 for 2012. Jenny also put in some sample anatomy "label-the-diagram" pictures throughout the semester.
There were no practise materials for Physiology. Practise material for Physiology from past exams were uploaded in SWOTVAC. However, you can find more PHYS20008 questions and get them from the UniMelb library or from people who took the subject last semester.
There was also no practise materials for Pharmacology but similarly, you can get questions from PHRM20001 students. There was also some Pharmacology practise questions too.
Textbook Recommendation:General Anatomy by Chris Biggs is a handy book to get you through the "Principles" lectures in anatomy (so maybe 3-4 weeks). A lot of the lecture slides have diagrams that come out of this book and the slides tend to follow the book as well. It is also useful for your ADSLs.
Anatomedia is useful for the ADSLs but a lot of it just contains text from
General Anatomy.
The lecturers take off many diagrams from
Grey's Anatomy but I don't think you really need to buy it. You can just google image things. In addition, I don't think anatomy is a subject you can really study just by reading text off a book. I never used Netter's Clinical Anatomy apart from a few ADSLs on the upper and lower limbs.
Human Physiology by Silverthorn is set for pre-reading before the physiology lectures. It's a decent book with nice-looking diagrams and the explanations are clear enough to follow. For most of the semester, I never did much pre-reading but before the physiology exam I read through the textbook seriously, using Charles' lectures to help me go through it. Not much pre-reading was assessed in the MST but some parts of it were on the exam.
I don't think the Pharmacology department ever even mentioned their textbook. Not useful anyway.
Lecturer(s):AnatomyP. Kitchener [Neuroanatomy] - you need to definitely write down the stuff that's not on the slides.
C. Anderson [Embryology]
V. Pilbrow [Bone, Articular System, Vascular System, Skin] - Varsha talks about examples in her lectures and it's important that you get all this down. This may be gibberish to you at this stage of the course because you haven't actually learnt what she's talking about yet, and she is a bit difficult to understand.
S. Murray [Musculoskeletal System]
J. Xiao [Gastrointestinal, Cardio, Lower Respiratory, Renal, Urinary] - Always tended to finish in around 40 mins
J. Ivanusic [Upper Respiratory, Reproductive]
Note these are the exact same lecturers in Science, with the exact same slides.
The anatomy department was fantastic. All of their slides were very clear.
PhysiologyD. Williams [Neurophysiology, Cardiovascular, Respiratory]
J. Bornstein [Digestive]
S. Harrap [Renal]
M. Wlodek [Reproductive]
+ A few guest doctors who lectured on applied physiology.
PharmacologyA. Stewart [Drugs and Receptors]
G. Mackay [Autonomic Pharmacology]
M. Lew [Pharmacokinetics]
Year & Semester of completion: 2014, Semester 2
Rating:Anatomy: 1.75/2
Physiology: 0.5/2
Pharmacology: 0.5/1
Overall: 2.75/5
Your Mark/Grade: H1 (92)
Comments: By department:
AnatomyIn line with previous reviews, I think Anatomy was the most well-taught part of the course. It may seem boring in the beginning. Neuroanatomy is taught well and embryology can be a bitch to understand since you have to visualise folding in 3D. Varsha's lectures on Bones etc are a bit dull but necessary, although she did teach bone ossification wrongly in HSF and was much more clearer in ANAT20006, so try watch the ANAT20006 lectures if you need clarification. After this, anatomy became a lot more enjoyable as you move onto identifying important structures in the body. You also do learn some clinical stuff in the musculoskeletal lectures especially (often about fractures, tears, compartment syndrome, endangered structures etc)
Anatomy is very much a visual subject and you should definitely take this into account when you study. I didn't write any summary notes for anatomy and just printed the lecture slides with labels and many annotations. This was quite effective and efficient. I don't believe writing and reading is going to really help you improve your anatomy - it's all about identifying structures and then commenting a little bit about its significance. Writing and reading in my opinion would just be excessive. Definitely pay attention to the diagrams in the lecture slides, even to the small detail.
You also get ADSL worksheets which complement each lecture series. These are helpful, but you definitely don't need to review these to do well. That being said, apparently the anatomy department likes to use images from the ADSLs in the exam so try go through them if you can. There is no quiz so ADSLs are not assessed in any way. I wish they did though because they are actually good practise. None of the "extension" material in the ADSLs come up in assessment either, so if you want you can skip the more obscure parts.
The anatomy practicals are pretty cool but you should really review the material before. If you don't know what the hell is going on and can't name a lot of things (which was me for like 3/4 practicals) then you're not going to get much out of it since you're just too confused to know what the demonstrator is talking about. They pretty much are just to help your learning and are not assessed. You pretty much just rotate around 5 stations, and at each station you're looking at some specimens with a demonstrator. Some demonstrators will actually explain a lot of stuff to you, others will just sit back, tell you to identify structures, and do nothing.
Assessment was also very fair, always covering the material, and to be honest, was very much on the easy side. Compared to the ANAT20006 MSTs they are exceptionally easy to do well in. Anatomy questions are apparently similar to past exams, so use them. Also try to find any student who is willing to give you questions from their ADSL quizzes.
The best way to learn anatomy is to get involved in identifying things and having quiz-offs. And you also have your own body. Use it. This is very helpful for understanding locomotion and the types of joints involved in each movement.
PhysiologyLol. If you don't know by now, physiology is the bane of this subject. Teaching quality is not great and I don't think I've seen a cohort this frustrated with something like this since Physics.
To be honest, I never paid any attention to the Neuro, cardio and respiratory lectures in HSF. I just grabbed ALL of Charles' lectures and studied off them, and then I listened to David at 2x speed. They're the exact same lecture slides with the exact same material, but for some reason David falls behind very easily and spends a lot of time digressing. I mean, one time he was stuck on the same slide for like 20 mins. He actually didn't even lecture on Smooth Muscles since he fell behind, and just told us to do the pre-reading for it. Sometimes even the PHRM20001 lectures explained their physiology better.
Later in the semester, we had 4 guest lecturers come in to lecture us on applied physiology. Most of these lectures seemed important and worth studying for the exam. This was relating Cardio and Respiratory physiology to clinical practise, so the lecturers came in to talk about how some diseases arise and what they can lead to (i.e aortic stenosis). 2 of them were decent and actually explained their material quite well. One was a bit nervous and sort of mumbled into the microphone but if you took the time to listen back to it, the material was ok. The last lecture was when our cohort just did not give a shit any more. I don't even know what the hell went on in that lecture after listening to it, but it was advanced respiratory physiology that we had never been exposed to and did not get references for. The lecture slides were also totally different and the lecturer spoke at 1000000x words per minute.
Digestive physiology was only explored in 2 lectures and I felt that the lecture slides were badly written and incoherent. In addition, I don't think it really explored the full picture of digestion as well - it seemed more like I just got a fragment of it. I had to listen to both Charles and Joel and combine the two to make sure I got the whole picture. Joel likes to test the pre-reading too (a lot of which he does not dwell on), so make sure you listen to Charles because he actually goes through it.
Stephen and Mary were decent physiology lecturers and actually explained the content well. No problems here!
You also get "concept checks" for each system. Basically it's just a short quiz on the LMS that's not assessed, and it's designed to give you feedback. However, we were never notified when the concept checks were added to the LMS, and the brilliant thing was that they disappeared after some time without warning (this was purposely done). So even if you did the quiz you couldn't check over it again. And these concept checks were never put back on the LMS for the whole semester too, so people would often prntscrn their responses. So make sure you save them and look over them in exam time.
Now, there's one style of questions that all students hate. The infamous "increase, decrease, no change, or not enough information" questions. These are annoying. I would rather have short-answer questions than this. I felt that these questions did not let you demonstrate your critical reasoning and detailed knowledge. Sometimes you have to assume something, sometimes you don't. Not many practise questions are put up in HSF so it is imperative to grab practise questions off PHYS20008 students, as many of the questions that actually come up are related. Some of our MST questions were just ripped off those seen in PHYS20008.
The physiology practical takes place at around Week 11 and you have until the end of week 12 to submit it. Again, it's about the cardiovascular response to dynamic and static exercise, which was not addressed in our lectures. Luckily Charles had an entire lecture on exercise so that was immensely helpful. In addition, they do direct you to a relevant textbook so it's not too bad. The report consists of 11 questions. The last question was quite random and in my opinion was chucked in just to justify our lecture in "Scholarly Literacy", and we had to identify appropriate articles that would help us in answering a particular research question. Overall, the practical report is not too hard. Some of your data might not make sense though - if this is the case, email Charles, who runs the practical. He allowed me to use somebody else's data since my data was acting completely opposite. Alternatively he also said that I could talk about expected results and what sort of experimental errors I could've encountered, but with the 1000-1200 word limit I opted for the former.
So, to sum it up, focus on PHYS20008 rather than the physiology component of HSF.
PharmacologyI was a student of PHRM20001 so my opinion is a little biased here, but I felt that Pharmacology was not necessary in HSF. It only skims the basics of Pharmacology and is definitely not integrated enough with physiology to justify it being there. You spend 3 lectures talking about how drugs bind to receptors, 1 on autonomic pharmacology (which is acceptable), 3 or 4 talking about Pharmacokinetics and then 1 on drug development. Seriously, drug development. They couldn't have at least lectured on something that was more physiological, could they?
While Graham and Michael are great lecturers, I thought that Alastair took too much time when he was lecturing on how drugs work. There is not much to know in this part and he does love to digress. It took a whole lecture just to go through affinity. I think this was taught much better in PHRM20001. That being said, although these lectures are bludgy if you're doing PHRM20001, don't neglect them and just add in stuff that's not in PHRM20001, especially Michael's lectures on adverse drug effects.
I gave this component a low score because I felt that it just clogged up space in HSF, which could have otherwise been used for important physiology lectures that were ripped out of the course. It didn't seem to relate very much to anything else we learnt. It would've been a lot better if they talked a little about therapeutics, such as treating asthma or hypertension, but this was not elaborated on.
The Pharmacology questions on the MST are fair though and sometimes they're assessed by "fill-in-the-blanks". There's also a nifty short answer where they give you features of made up drugs and ask you which drug would have the smallest Vd, would be eliminated the fastest, etc.
OVERALL COMMENTSTo me, this subject feels unnecessary. It is pretty much ANAT20006 and PHYS20008 mushed into one subject, with bits being taken out due to the Pharmacology component and other parts (particularly in Physiology) being taught quite badly. I would rather have done ANAT20006 and PHYS20008 separately than HSF. You get the exact same lecture slides for Anatomy and Physiology, so you're pretty much being tested on the same material. However, you get less resources. A lot less. ANAT20006 students get ADSL quizzes for each topic, you just have the ADSL worksheet and no quiz. We were given some Physiology practise material though (although most of them were just pulled off the past exams in the UniMelb library).
Therefore, you should really contact other students for their resources. Grab anything you can from PHRM20001, ANAT20006 and PHYS20008, because you're not getting any from HSF.
HSF is structured so that you'll have a lecture on the anatomy of one system, followed by its physiology (or the other way around). I didn't mind this, it felt natural. However the lectures aren't integrated. I feel that this may have been purposely done, because the staff have said that it's up to the students to integrate the material themselves. This actually stirred up quite a lot of controversy in our cohort and the coordinator ended up asking if we would like integrated questions in the exam, but the cohort turned it down probably because we didn't feel at all ready to begin answering integrated questions. So the anatomy and physiology/pharmacology remained separated. If the lectures at least guided us on integration, I think the cohort would have been more receptive to the idea of having integrated exams. But they weren't.
The MSTs weren't too difficult but it's very hard to tell where you went wrong. The first MST tested Neurophysiology, Neuroanatomy, Embryology, and Varsha's lectures. It consisted of around 30 questions and two "label-the-diagrams"/"fill-in-the-blanks" questions. The second MST followed a similar format but tested Musculoskeletal, Gastrointestinal, and Pharmacology. It was meant to test Digestive Physiology as well but that didn't come up at all for some reason.
Anatomy is the first exam and it consists of 3 sections.
-Section A has 25 MCQ and is mostly weighted on what wasn't in the MSTs, so Cardio, Respiratory, Renal, Urinary and Repro.
-Section B has "label-the-diagrams" and "fill-in-the-blanks" questions covering the whole course.
-Section C requires you to respond to four long-essay questions covering the whole course.
With the exam, there was a definite emphasis on the latter half of the Anatomy content. Neuroanatomy, embryology and anatomical principles were not featured at all. You could've just studied from Simon's lectures onwards and still do well. A lot of things weren't covered in assessment and it definitely annoyed me seeing as how I spent so much time learning the intricate details of everything and memorising as much as I could. The exam turned out to be much easier than expected.
The second exam assesses physiology and pharmacology and it is ALL MCQ, so don't waste your time doing the short answer and long essay questions from past exams. Unlike Anatomy, this exam is more difficult. It demands a thorough understanding (not just your rote-learning) and there are a few traps that are easy to fall into if you aren't perceptive of small detail. Many of the questions are your "increase/decrease/no change/not enough information" ones as well as some of your more traditional "pick the correct answer" questions. As said, the increase/decrease questions can be a pain in the ass as you're left doubting yourself so much. With those questions it's best to scribble a flowchart of the likely response. Pay attention to the wording too. One of the harder questions on the exam involved the Baroreceptor reflex integrated with your neurophysiology, which I felt was a pretty nice question that really tested how you think, as you needed to be aware of the responses involving both systems. Pharmacokinetics was also assessed through the "increase/decrease" format, where they pretty much have to use the features of 3 made-up drugs to answer the question. A lot of the drugs mentioned in HSF weren't assessed at all (in fact, I don't think any drug was).
Indeed, exam pre-reading is assessable and the physiology department has loved to test small detail on the slides, so always pay attention to any graphs they give you. To do well here, it's imperative that you go beyond the set lectures and read the textbook. Or just watch lectures from PHYS20008, since they will actually go through the material that HSF doesn't have time for with and yes, sometimes they have assessed those things in the past. To prepare for this exam, definitely focus on the MCQ portions of exams, read the textbook, and have a sharp eye for detail.
So really, this subject is essentially just a poor mis-mash of ANAT20006 and PHYS20008 with basic Pharmacology thrown in. I didn't actually find it hard since I just hoarded resources off Science students, but was just frustrated with how the subject is constructed and the quality of the physiology section.