Principles of Microbiology & Immunology or Fundamentals of Cell Biology?

[mc1316]

I have read the reviews for Principles of Microbiology & Immunology and Fundamentals of Cell Biology (and their numbers are pretty similar). Can anyone please swing me one way for the other.

[pink0829]

I did both last semester and I liked Cell Biology much more. Everyone I know who did Miim20001 didn't really like it. It was a well-coordinated subject and all that, but somehow I didn't find the content that interesting (I really liked the immunology and virology bits but not the rest). I didn't write a review for MIIM because simpak pretty much covered most of what I would have said. Although, I should've done one because we had to two new lecturers who weren't that great.

I found Cell Biology much easier to do well in. There were no trick questions, everything was pretty straight-forward, unlike MIIM, and the content was easier to understand. There wasn't as much rote-learning and the lecturers were heaps better than MIIM. There were some tricky/confusing bits covered in the latter parts of the course, but lectopia and talking to lecturers helped a lot. Both subjects required you to know quite a bit of detail, though. But the exam had essay questions worth 50 marks. Some of them were broken into bits and they weren't really essays. More like drawing picture to explain something or listing something with advantages and disadvantages. Microbiology had short answer questions which were much easier to answer, but make up only 30 marks I think and the rest was multiple choice (like in the review) and fill-in- the blanks with a list of words like biology which were where the trick questions were included.

Even though I did much better in MIIM than in Cell Biology (91 vs. 82) I would still recommend Cell Bio to anyone because I really liked it. It all really depends on what you really like and you what you plan to do in third year.

[mc1316]

I did both last semester and I liked Cell Biology much more. Everyone I know who did Miim20001 didn't really like it. It was a well-coordinated subject and all that, but somehow I didn't find the content that interesting (I really liked the immunology and virology bits but not the rest). I didn't write a review for MIIM because simpak pretty much covered most of what I would have said. Although, I should've done one because we had to two new lecturers who weren't that great.

I found Cell Biology much easier to do well in. There were no trick questions, everything was pretty straight-forward, unlike MIIM, and the content was easier to understand. There wasn't as much rote-learning and the lecturers were heaps better than MIIM. There were some tricky/confusing bits covered in the latter parts of the course, but lectopia and talking to lecturers helped a lot. Both subjects required you to know quite a bit of detail, though. But the exam had essay questions worth 50 marks. Some of them were broken into bits and they weren't really essays. More like drawing picture to explain something or listing something with advantages and disadvantages. Microbiology had short answer questions which were much easier to answer, but make up only 30 marks I think and the rest was multiple choice (like in the review) and fill-in- the blanks with a list of words like biology which were where the trick questions were included.

Even though I did much better in MIIM than in Cell Biology (91 vs. 82) I would still recommend Cell Bio to anyone because I really liked it. It all really depends on what you really like and you what you plan to do in third year.

Thanks, I will do cell biology then, but is there any particular reason you had the 9 mark disparity?

[pink0829]

I was a bit late to the exam, and had to run to the toilet twice so I couldn't do one of my 25 mark questions in the cell Bio exam and also a short answer question. But I was really confident with the rest of the paper so I went at my usual pace instead of doing things faster and messing up and writing incoherent responses (esp. for section C).
You just have to know your work really well for the subject. But just ask others who've done the subject before doing it because I feel like there might have been people who didn't like it as much as I did.

[spalvains]

I can confirm everything that's been said about cell bio, it was my best subject last semester (88) and it was interesting enough to get me to switch to a cell & dev bio major. It was a really well run subject, and you do several assessments throughout the semester that let you know where you sit compared to the class average.
Plus, just a heads up, I'm doing Biochemical Regulation of Cell Function this semester and there's a crazy amount of overlap, so if you're interested in biochemistry and end up taking cell bio (and biochem), I would recommend it as a second semester subject (though we're only two weeks in, I may change my recommendation by the end haha).