Subject Code/Name: ANAT20006 Principles of Human StructureWorkload: 3 x 1 hour lectures per week
4 x 2 hour practicals throughout the semester
- Practical Class Week 7: Anatomical Structures
- Practical Class Week 8: Upper and Lower Limbs
- Practical Class Week 10: Back and Vertebral Column, Respiritary & Cardiovascular Systems
- Practical Class Week 12: Gastrointestinal, Reproductive and Urinary Systems
Assessment: ADSL Quizes x 8 (10% in Total)
2 x 30 minute mid semester tests (worth 15% each)
Final exam (worth 60%)
Lectopia Enabled: Yes, with screen capture
Past exams available: No. However for Sections B and C of the exam they release a few sample Questions for you to get an understanding of the way these sections are set out. They don't release answers however in the Exam Revision Lecture Junhua answers a few of them.
Textbook Recommendation: General Anatomy: Principles and Applications (Eizenberg) and Gray/s Anatomy are recommended. However often they emphasise in lectures how the textbooks cover topics in far more detail than they teach you. Hence I think reading any 'recommended' textbooks would only be confusing and probably a waste of time. I never used any textbooks as the lectures and ADSL online tutorials were enough.
Lecturer(s): Junhua Xiao, Dagmar Wilhelm, Jason Ivanusic, Stuart Mazzone, Simon Murray and Varsha Pilbrow. All the lecturers are pretty good, but Junhua is by far the best. As the subject coordinater, she always makes it VERY clear what is assessible as she goes through her lectures. I found it useful watching her lectures online for notetaking because of the quality of her explanations.
Year & Semester of completion: 2018
Rating: 4/5
Your Mark/Grade: 87 (H1)
Comments: PracticalsThe practicals are very useful. If you're lucky enough to get good demonstrators (which are medical students), then you'll gain a lot out of them. My advise would be to try if you can go through the prac booklet before each prac and start answering the questions. I found that going into the pracs with an understanding of the concepts they cover really helped. Often you'll see a lot of people who haven't even read the booklet and then when the demonstrators are asking questions and explaining things, these people look very lost. As you are in a small group of about 8 people, you often spend most of the practical having discussions with other students and your demonstrator. Hence, that's why it's a lot more useful to enter the pracs as prepared as possible because otherwise you won't be able to contrubute to any discussion.
For clarification the pracs don't usually assess any content outside the lecture material, however sometimes demonstrators will inform you of some finer detail and hints to questions on the MSTs, so it's important that you're actually listening to what they say.
Mid Semester TestsI found the assessment quite fair. There are 2 MST's across the semester that are not too difficult if you know the lecture content.
MST 1 covered material from Lectures 1-12 (Embryology, Nervous System, Human form and function, Skeletal System & Bones, Articular System, Muscular System, Inegumental System, Vascular System). I find this MST a bit harder than MST 2 despite the fact that MST 2 assessed more content. A lot of fine detail is assessed here, and in my opinion the embryology questions were the hardest (although some people from other reviews stated the Nervous System to be the most difficult concept, but I disagree). The average for MST 1 was 22/30 (I recieved 24/30) while the average for MST 2 was 21/30 (I recieved 27/30). While the average for MST 2 was lower, in my opinion MST 2 is much easier to do well in. While it assesses lectures 13-25 (Vertebral column & Back, Upper Limbs, Lower Limbs, Visceral Systems, Upper and Lower Respiratory Tracts, Thorax, Cardiovascular system), I personally found the nature of the content easier to remember. In saying this however, the upper and lower limb topics were EXTREMELY dense with content and it was often very difficult trying to remember this section. Luckily there was only a couple questions relating to this topic such as which muscles are innervated by what nerve/artery etc....
At first 30 minutes for 30 MCQs seems daunting, but you will find that it usually only takes 15-20 minutes to complete the entire test, giving you time to go back and review your answers.
They do not release the answers to either of the MSTs, however they do email you a report of which areas you got questions wrong in. For example, it may say you got Question 5 wrong and then below state that Question 5 assessed the Nervous System etc... It never really bothered me that they didn't release specific answers because the exam doesn't assess any of this content in Mutiple Choice format anyway.
ADSL Tasks ADSLs were essentially weekly quizes. They release a 'Tutorial' each week (The name is a bit misleading - they are basically online modules that include diagrams and more information from the topics covered in lectures), and then a quiz to be completed that accompanies each Tutorial. The tutorials are LENGTHY and it often took me multiple days to hand write all my notes from them. Some people may prefer to just read them, however I found it useful to actually write the information down and print out the images (or if you don't have the time you could just type them). The ADSL tutorials also are accompanied with links to a website called Anatomedia (which a lot of the lecture diagrams come from). Anatomedia and the ADSL tutorial information work hand in hand, and the Anatomedia content often goes into a lot more depth. Often you have to make an informed decision about which Anatomedia content is actually relevant (as a lot is extened knowledge that isn't assessed) and in the beginning it can be a bit overwhelming. At the top of the page for each ADSL Tutorial it will provide 'refrences' for sections to go through in Anatomedia. FOLLOW THIS. Otherwise you will just get overwhelmed by the amount of sections/topics Anatomedia has and which ones to go through. In addition, having the lecture notes opened as you go through each ADSL Tutorial/Anatomedia helps work out which sections of Anatomedia are relevant and worth revising. The accompanied ADSL Test (which is open for a number of days) is a free 10% to your assessment. They have a 20 minute time limit each however you can complete them multiple times until you recieve 100% . However if you don't get 10/10 on the first go it won't tell you which ones you got wrong. I was usually always behind due to how long it took to go through each tutorial, so when the due date for the tests came, I always found myself using StudentDoc where people had uploaded the answers to the quiz. My suggestion is to screenshot your answers to the quiz because once the quiz closes you can't access them again for revision.
ExamThe exam this semester was very fair and in my opinion less difficult than expected. However, that isn't because the exam was necessarily easy (as I'm sure many people would have found it hard) but because of the way I approached my revision of diagrams. As stated extensively in other reviews the bulk of the exam assesses your ability to label and answer questions referring to DIAGRAMS. Any of the diagrams in the ADSLs, Anatomedia, prac booklet and the lectures CAN and WILL appear on the exam. At first this seems a bit fustrating because there is A LOT of potential diagrams that they could choose to put in the exam and it may come down to a bit of luck in terms of which diagrams you understand best. My advise is that during your exam revision, make a document of all the ADSL/Anatomedia diagrams from your revision notes and practise labelling them without any help. I would label them during SWOTVAC everyday before I began revising my other notes until I had them all commited to memory, and also to make sure I wasn't forgetting how to label things the next day.
The format of the exam is:Section A: 20 MCQs on the remaining 1/3 of the course that wasn't assessed in the MSTS. If you have revised this content well enough then you will be able to pretty much answer all the questions during reading time.
Section B: 4 x 10 mark questions each requiring you to label a diagram (so that's 4 diagrams). This is a "fill in the gaps" style of answering Q's so again, it's all MCQ. This semester 2/4 of the diagrams were from lectures and the other 2 were from the ADSLs. I was pretty relieved with this section because 3/4 diagrams I was familiar with (the other one less so but I managed to make a few educated guesses). An Embryology diagram from the lectures initially caught me off guard but when it came to answering it, it was actually not too difficult if you knew the basics. I didn't study embryology much because one of the practical demonstrators told my group that they never really assessed embryology on the exam, but luckily it wasn't too difficult if you knew the general concepts of embryology.
Section C: 4 x 15 mark questions that each include a diagram. This is the "extended response" section, that is broken down into numerous questions (It's not just a single 15 mark question). This section is the most difficult because you don't have the help of MCQ memory cues. Each of the 4 questions will include a diagram that you have to label, and in this section there will be no list of words to choose from when labelling. So you really do need to make sure you're familar with diagrams, but luckily each label was usually only worth 1/2 mark. In addition to labelling a diagram, you will get questions relating specifically to the diagram and questions not relating to the diagram. They will also assess clinical significance here.
Again, you shouldn't really feel too pressed for time. I think I finished the exam with about 15 minutes to spare. If you're lucky enough to be familar with the diagrams from Section B, and the MCQ questions in Section A, then these 2 MCQ sections can be completed quicker than "a minute a mark".
All in all, this subject rewards those who dedicate a lot of time into commiting a whole lot of facts and diagrams to memory. If you have completed revision notes throughout the semester, then by the the time SWOTVAC comes you can just spend your time revising and reading through them.
Goodluck!!!!