Subject Code/Name: BIOL10005 Genetics & The Evolution of Life Workload: - 3 x one hour lectures per week
- 1 hour per week of tutorials or workshops
- 2 hours of practical work per fortnight and
- 3 hours per week of e-learning including independent learning tasks, pre and post laboratory activities.
Assessment: • A 45 minute, multiple choice test held mid-semester (10%);
• A combination of assessment of practical skills within the practical class, completion of up to 5 on-line pre-practical tests, written work within the practical not exceeding 500 words and up to 5 short multiple choice tests (25%)
• An assignment based on the practical content and not exceeding 1000 words (10%) ,
• Completion of 5 Independent Learning Tasks throughout the semester (5%)
• A 3 hour examination on theory and practical work in the examination period (50%).
A pass in the practical work is necessary to pass the subject (i.e. an 80% attendance at the practical classes together with a result for the assessed practical work of at least 50%).
(Weighting of assessment seems to have changed for 2015, have a look at the handbook for more details)
Lectopia Enabled: Yes, with screen capture. No problems here. You should have no problems watching and listening to the lectures at home.
Past exams available: No, only a sample exam. The sample exam had more section D questions than were on the actual exam.
Textbook Recommendation: - R B Knox, P Y Ladiges, B K Evans and R Saint, Biology, An Australian Focus 4th Ed, McGraw-Hill, 2010
- Prac manual from the co-op bookstore (it’s about 25$)
You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to, but I found it pretty useful in explaining concepts and for providing useful insight. The diagrams are pretty helpful too although the lecturers usually put them on their lecture slides. The lecturers also provide you with references to the textbook.
Lecturer(s): Lectures 1-16: Dawn Gleeson (Genetics)
Lecture 1: Genetics: variation and the genome
Lecture 2: Structure and replication of DNA
Lecture 3: Genes, alleles and chromosomes
Lecture 4: Behaviour of chromosomes and alleles: segregation of alleles
Lecture 5: Multiple alleles and other extensions to Mendel
Lecture 6: Sex determination
Lecture 7: Inheritance related to sex and X inactivation
Lecture 8: Two genes and independent assortment
Lecture 9: Gene interaction
Lecture 10: Gene linkage: departure from independent assortment
Lecture 11: Multifactorial and polygenic inheritance
Lecture 12: Techniques and Manipulation of the genetic material
Lecture 13: Gene expression: Transcription and the genetic code
Lecture 14: Gene expression: Translation
Lecture 15: Mutation
Lecture 16: Using genomic variation for identity
Lectures 17-24: Rick Wetherbee (Botany)
Lecture 17: Earth history and evolution of life
Lecture 18: Classification and evolution
Lecture 19: Protists: the primary producers
Lecture 20: Protists: animal-like consumers and fungal-like absorbers
Lecture 21: Fungi: the great recyclers
Lecture 22: Plants invade the land
Lecture 23: Seed plants
Lecture 24: Flowering plants (Angiosperms)
Lectures 25-32: Theresa Jones (Zoology)
Lecture 25: Introducing the Animal Kingdom
Lecture 26: Animal diversity: from worms to arthropods
Lecture 27: Animal diversity: from molluscs to chordates
Lecture 28: Animal diversity: the big picture
Lecture 29: The vertebrate story: where Primates fit in
Lecture 30: The Hominid family
Lecture 31: Ecology and evolution
Lecture 32: Natural and sexual selection, adaptation and extinction
Lectures 33-36: Dawn Gleeson (Population Genetics)
Lecture 33: Hardy-Weinberg: calculating allele frequencies
Lecture 34: H-W departures: selection, non random mating
Lecture 35: H-W departures: mutation, migration & genetic drift
Lecture 36: Natural selection & speciation
Year & Semester of completion: 2014, Semester 2.
Rating: 4.7 Out of 5
Comments: Lecturers I really liked all the lecturers in this subject (most of the time
). Dawn was really good, easy to understand, takes you through each example step by step, provides you with heaps of practice questions, she’s easily approachable for any queries and she’s really nice! She also provides you with a 'what to know' slide every here and then which really helps cause it tells you exactly what you need to know. I liked her lecture slides. Some people complained because they were overly long and hard to understand. I had no problems with this, as long as you pay attention in the lectures and write down notes on your lecture slides you should be okay. If you're not, there's always the book to help you out (most of her diagrams are from the book). Often she wouldn't finish what is on the lecture slides in one lecture but she would go over them during the next lecture.
Rick was really engaging and enthusiastic. You can tell this guy knows his stuff. He's lectures were clear and he was clear with what he expected from us. One thing about Rick was that his lecture slides were a bit dry. He would take out (essential) pictures and diagrams which would make them look really dull. Most of the diagrams are in the textbook though.
Theresa’s lectures would get dry on a rare few occasions. I found that at times she would just read off slides (rarely though). Most of the time she would explain everything really well. Her lecture slides were fantastic though, provided us with everything that we needed. But, she wasn't explicit about what we should know and what we shouldn't. In the exam tutorial she said that questions can be taken from any part of her lectures (without exception). Basically, she wanted us to know everything she presented on the lecture. This was a real pain, but her questions weren't that hard in the exam so it was alright.
Tutorials Okay so, there’s a tutorial every week which takes place in the first hour of your allocated three hour prac time (the one before your prac is called a workshop). They were useful at times at other times they really weren’t much of a help. You basically go over the tutorial worksheets at the end of your prac manual but at times they’ll give you something else to do. I found the genetics tutorials really helpful as they would take you through potential exam and MST like questions. The rest of the time they were okay. Recently, during the workshops they’ve been taking you through the practical and they may hint at assessment tasks that you have to do in the prac, so yeah you’re choice on whether you want to go or not
Assessment Okay, so there’s 5 forms of assessment in this subject:
Practical assessment-ongoing throughout the semester (25%) You have 5 practicals throughout the semester (well 6 but the first one isn’t assessed) worth 5% each (5 x 5 = 25%). Each practical is out of 10 marks (same as 1st semester, but I’ll still go through it incase you're interested):
- 1 mark comes from a pre-practical test done on the LMS. It is untimed and open book. There are 10 questions on the test and you are required to get 8/10 or more to get the mark for the pre-prac. It has to be done before you come to the practical class. You shouldn’t have a problem with the pre-pracs, the answers to them are in your prac-book.
- 5 marks come from in-prac assessment. This may take the form of a quiz at the end of the practical, or you may be required to hand something in. Sometimes, you may to show your tutor something that you’ve done in the practical
- 4 marks are from the post-prac test. These are TIMED 15 minute tests. They’ve made it longer from last semester from 10-15 mins. These test your understanding of what you’ve done in the prac so pay attention !
You will be assigned to be in either group A or B. Group A have their pracs one week earlier than group B.
Mid-semester test held in week 6 (10%) A 45 minute multiple choice test held during your tutorial time. This tested lectures 1-14. It was much more challenging than last semester. I was really pushed for time and wasn’t able to do a few questions properly. It’s out of 25 marks. It mainly consisted of genetics questions with a few questions on DNA replication. The genetics part can take a while if you haven’t practiced it well so make sure to practice well. A practice MST was posted on the LMS, make sure you do it because some of the questions were similar to the ones that were on the actual MST.
Probably a week after the MST, the answers are posted onto the noticeboard in the Redmond Barry Building (they don’t post it on the LMS for some reason) if you want to have a look at the answers.
Independent Learning Tasks-ILTs (5%) There were 5 independent learning tasks that you had to do throughout the semester. It involved clicking through an online ‘tutorial’, after this you had to do a final quiz. Each ILT was worth 1% and you had to get 5/10 on the quiz to get the 1%. Some of the ILT content was linked in with the lectures which was good, but some of it wasn’t. If you really want you could use google to do these, but these are examinable so I would suggest going through them.
Assignment (10%) There were two parts to this both due a week after the mid-semester test (or 2 weeks if you were in group B):
Part 1 was the take home part. Firstly, you had to use this program called e-fly to generate a cross. Using your results you had to answer some questions, indicating ratios, alleles, which allele is dominant etc… Secondly, you were assigned a topic and you had to search for an article based on it using the library database. You also had to answer questions on the way such as what keyword would you use? You also had to watch two videos which taught you how to search. You had to apply these techniques to search for your article.
Part 2 was a mini ‘test’ done in your tutorial class. The questions were on independent assortment but involved two genes and gene interaction. There were 3 questions and these shouldn’t be too hard if you have studied. You may feel that you are pushed for time so you’ll have to learn to do them quickly. Many people did not do this well because they thought it was going to be on the article they had to search up. IT IS NOT, don’t be fooled !
Exam (50%) Okay so, the exam was in the first day of the exam period and it was a step up from BIOL10004, don’t expect it to be the same. You will be massively pushed for time if you don’t have good technique and if you don’t how to solve genetics problems fast enough. The structure was the same as semester 1. It was out of 180 marks. Section A was multiple choice, Section B,C was fill in the blanks from a box full of choices and section D was three essays worth 10 marks each, one essay from genetics, one from botany, one from zoology.
Multiple choice questions were okay, you have one mark and two mark questions. Some of the two mark multiple choice genetics questions really required you to think. The Botany and Zoology section was mainly testing your understanding of the lecture material (no problem solving here).
Section B and C were fair. The first question of Section B really put me off though, they had pictures of 4 fossils and they required you to label the species to which the fossil belonged to. Luckily, the options weren’t too confusing and I was able to narrow down the option to like 6 or 7. A majority of this section was dedicated to genetics. Make sure you are proficient with genetic ratios with two genes (9A-:B-;3A-:bb;3aa;B-;1aa:bb) and gene interaction (recessive epistasis, dominant epistasis and all the other ones) and make sure you know how to do calculations with a three point test cross. You also need to know how to do a chi square test and need to be able to calculate allele frequencies. Make sure you get lots of practice. There was only one question on botany (surprisingly) about the evolution of land plants, it was pretty long though. Wasn’t too hard if you learnt the phylogeny and know where the key adaptation appear. There were a lot of zoology questions here, so revise it well. Weren’t many questions on the hominid species, but I would still recommend learning the name of the species.
Section D was the essay. For this section, make sure to have a few examples (makes the essay stronger), don’t go overboard and write down everything you know about the topic. Try to have some structure (there are marks dedicated towards this). Usually, there's a problem solving question for the genetics question, but for us it was on sex determination. It changes every year so just be prepared. The last question of this section was really weird, it is about some meteor hitting an ocean in Australia (something along those lines) and it asked you to write about the consequences. If you had read about the previous extinctions and their consequences, you should be able to link them in here. I couldn't think of anything else to write for that question lol. Yeah, that was pretty much the exam
Recommendations Try to start revising early for this subject because there is a LOT of content here. DON’T leave it all to SWOTVAC, try starting a few weeks before hand. To do well in this subject:
-Stay on top of the content, use the MST to revise the first few lectures and use the mid-sem break to catch up on the middle block of lectures. That way, you won’t have too much to do during SWOTVAC
-Do lots of practice with genetics problems. Dawn usually posts up question sets on the LMS with answers and solutions. DO THEM !
-DON’T FORGET to do the ILTs, pre-pracs and post-pracs. These make up a pretty fair portion of your mark
-Do the sample exam
-Know what you will be doing in each prac so that you won’t be lost.
Final Comments Overall, a pretty fun subject and an enjoyable one to study. I really liked the diversity of topics covered. At times, I was put off by the botany content because I wasn’t really that interested but Rick presented everything really clearly and in an enthusiastic way which made it fun to learn. There are a lot of new terms that you will have to learn here, it may put you off at times. Just hang in there, don’t try to cram everything into your brain, let it settle and you’ll find that everything comes together really well (remember reading this in a previous review, it’s so true !). That’s pretty much all I can think of right now. If you have any queries, feel free to give me a PM
!