A slight warning to those taking the subject - many topics covered in a short amount of time, and so the amt of work for a H1 is much more than H1 in other subjects. Probably useful if sitting the GAMSAT, but entirely possible to cover the physics in GAMSAT on your own; I’m pretty sure only ~20% of one of the 3 sections of the GAMSAT is physics related. Personally, lecturers were of no use to me; their explanations were shallow and essentially impossible to understand unless you complete the relevant textbook chapters beforehand. In other words, lectures will only be beneficial if you do the textbook beforehand so that you know what they are talking about. PSC (prob solving) sheets very useful, and so were the PSC tutors; definitely attend your PSC classes but make sure you have done the sheets beforehand so you can ask questions during. Pracs are a nightmare if you don’t know how they work- to do well basically answer all the questions the night before yourself, so that you aren’t rushed during it. The practical instructors don’t mind if you have pre-answered your questions. Homework quizzes should be free marks if you keep up to date with content. Exam is definitely scaled up so don’t be discouraged if you can’t complete a lot of questions. To summarise, maximise your marks on the pracs and homework quizzes, and for the exam be familiar with all the topics (by doing PSCs, textbook questions, lecture questions)

Don't take this subject, the second half of it is not well taught at all. There's no point in paying tuition just to go on Youtube and try to figure things out yourself. Took this subject for gamsat and I wish I'd listened to the comments here. Please do yourself a favour and stay away, it's hard, not well taught and just outright impossible. Final is in 2 days and I still feel like I don't know anything. Avoid at all costs, unless this is your prerequisite I don't see any point in taking it. You don't need this subject even for gamsat, did gamsat this March and got 73 for the science section, you don't need this subject, just stay away. I haven't met anyone who's satisfied with this subject, and if they don't scale us the fail rate is gonna be pretty lol.

I managed a H2B in this subject and I strongly suggest that if you hated physics previously please do not take this subject hoping that it might change your mind. The lectures are structured very weirdly, and the lecturer, bless him as he seems to know a lot, wasn't very engaging. There are random questions that are distributed throughout the slides that he answers in the "friday lecture" but if he had answered the questions in the actual lectures they showed up in, it would have probably made so much more sense to me as pushing it to Friday completely disjointed the learning process. At the start, motion and forces was pretty straight forward but the difficulty of this subject definitely increased further. The weekly quizzes were fairly easy and were a good chance to test your knowledge but the "lab activities" and labs were terribly dry and weren't very engaging (on-campus) and trying to finish a decent lab report within the lab time was also quite difficult. Unless you need it for another subject I would suggest staying away. I know this subject also lures in a lot of future GAMSAT takers but if you are not mathematically/physics strong then this subject will be overwhelming and your WAM will take a hit.

Grade: P lmao. I was not a fan of this subject. Do not do unless you're absolutely sure you want to take it on/you have to for the GAMSAT. 85% of the time I did not understand what the lecturers were trying to explain. Whilst it's apparent that they are skilled in their fields, lecturing is certainly not one of them. I ended up just skimming through lectures and using youtube to learn the content (Organic Chemistry Tutor on youtube is a GOD). This helped me pass. I had a strong foundation in maths, so I found the first few weeks fairly okay with kinematics and mechanics, but after this, it was an inundation of concepts and formulas that I couldn't really fully understand nor keep track of. The pracs were generally straightforward, they're marked and run by a PhD student, so try to make a good impression on them. The activities weren't too bad as well. Every week there would be one 10 mark multiple choice quiz you'd need to do. The problem about this was that it was for the previous week's content, meaning that almost all of the cohort was perennially behind. You get three attempts on this quiz and the highest mark is kept. I'd say it definitely is possible to get full marks on all quizzes, but it'd be a bit time-consuming. Every week there'd be two online content lectures, one tutorial 'problem solving' class and one live lecture. In the live lecture, only examples and demos would be gone through. As someone else pointed out, during the online content lectures, the lecturers would show specific questions we were to go through in the live lecture which was super annoying as I would've preferred to go through them then and there. They also told us that we were expected to have knowledge of the week's content if we went to the live lecture, and as previously mentioned, the vast majority of us were one week behind always. As a result of this, most people did not go (or even watch) the live lectures. The problem solving class was okay, my tutor wasn't great, so attendance started waning after the first few weeks, but my friend had a great tutor and apparently a full class all semester. By halfway through the semester I had been sucked dry of initial curiosity into physics to be honest. I mostly got by on the formula sheet and plugging values in. That's all this subject was to me -- formulas. The exam was not good. I answered just a bit over half of the questions. It was online and made up of two parts: written and a canvas submission in the style of the weekly quizzes. Anyway, I'm glad I don't have to do that again! Good luck to future students, keep pushing through :)

Just graduated with a low H1. DO NOT TAKE THIS GODDAMN SUBJECT. The lecturers are nice enough, but they ARE NOT QUALIFIED TEACHERS BY ANY MEANS. They will not explain any content clearly, and everything is blown through so quickly, you never have time to appreciate or really understand any formulas or anything. By the end of the year, you'll have a book full of maybe 200 formulas or so, but no true understanding of how to use them, how they were discovered, or what they even mean. THIS SUBJECT IS TERRIBLE. The pracs are alright enough, I suppose, though the online ones were absolutely terrible. The tutorials are a complete waste of time and you'd be better off doing the questions in your own time. The textbook is around 1200 pages of absolute waffle, and it's so dense you don't even have the time or effort to read through it. This subject is a BUNCH OF BS. SERIOUSLY. AVOID AT ALL COSTS. For the love of god, DO NOT TAKE IT. I only got through by sheer luck and chance.

Grade: Low H1 Avoid at all costs. This subject is terrible. Lectures: Make no sense. While I'm sure the lecturer is an amazing physicist, I just, for the life of me, did not find him to be a good explainer. The main issue is that the digital format of the lectures severely reduce the demonstrations or body language that can be shown to students, which made lectures just really unapproachable. A major issue is the lack of worked examples. While the powerpoints contain exam questions, the issue is that these exam questions are never covered by the lecturer in the actual lecture, and are instead worked through in friday's "live lecture", which I found to be really annoying. This is because by the time this lecture is actually held/uploaded to the LMS, you have already kind of forgotten what happened in that question. Another big issue is that because the lecturer never works out questions during the lecture where they are teaching the content for the first time, it's really easy to have zero idea about what the concept is and how it can be applied in a problem. Thus, lectures basically consist of you being fed content that is never shown to be applied in a problem, and as a result it makes understanding some of the complicated or new concepts really difficult. Perhaps a useful modification to the lectures could instead have been to work through example questions at the time the content is taught, in order to actually better demonstrate the concepts. Note that I am not insinuating there is absolutely zero worked examples, there are a few, but they are simply just 'plug in the formula' type examples which anyone with zero understanding of the theory could solve. Overall, the lectures just don't really help to understand the theory. Practicals: There were 3 of them this semester, and I found them manageable. This is coming from someone who is absolutely terrible at practicals, and despises them. They basically consist of you with a team doing the experiment and noting down observations in your lab note books and drawing conclusions. The work in your lab book is then marked by your demonstrator. I found these difficult to keep up in terms of actually doing the experiment physically, but the lab work at least seemed to have been assessed fairly leniently. Make sure you read the lab notes about the experiment before your practical. Tutorials (Problem solving classes): These were the saving grace of this subject. I found my tutor Nick to be really good at explaining the concepts and he helped a lot with joining the admittedly large gaps in my understanding of physics. They basically consisted of us going through the questions on a worksheet with questions of mixed difficulties. Highly recommend attending these so you don't fall behind too much on the content. Weekly quizzes: These were alright for the most part, especially since they give 5 attempts. Some of the questions are hard but 10/10 on all of the quizzes is totally achievable. Activities: These were a complete dog move by the faculty. They gave us the first activity on the first week, and I didn't even realise it contributed towards our final grade. There are 3 of these, and the 1st and the second one I did find fairly difficult and did not do too hot on. The third one, about circuits, was easy, however. We do get a decent amount of time for these so it isn't terrible. Final thoughts: I found this subject to be very difficult. The hard to understand lectures made me resort to going through the textbook and doing the readings, so I can actually try understand whats happening. While this is fine and all, reading the textbook genuinely takes forever and as a result I was dedicating whole weekends just to do the textbook and corresponding questions so I can have a barebones understanding of the content. To make it worse, it really isn't clear what is examinable or not. The lectures cover heisenbergs uncertainty principle, but it is never explicitly mentioned if it is examinable, and there are other similar topics like this that we are left guessing about. There are also some concepts that they never teach us in lectures, but proceed to give us tutorial and exam questions on which I also found really frustrating. If you are coming from a zero physics background, expect to be throw in the deep end from day one. They cover so much in this course, and it is so easy to fall behind quickly if you do not put in the hours every week. I think I was spending upwards of 8 hours per week outside of lectures and quizzes on this subject each week to barely keep up. It was a frustrating grind just to keep my head above water and I do not want anyone else to go through that. I understand that a lot of biomedicine and science students who are aspiring doctors will want to take this course, and you probably will even if I discourage you from doing so because of the GAMSAT prep or whatever. All I want to tell you is that you should prepare for a very tough subject, and I highly recommend learning some of the concepts before you dive into it, namely newtons laws, basic mechanics (velocity, speed, acceleration, etc.) and circular motion. This will at least give you some time to ease into this subject for the first few weeks so you can be better prepared. They do occasionally throw GAMSAT questions at you in the lectures, but as mentioned before, these are rarely worked out on the spot and are instead referred to in the live lecture, which I found frustrating.

I got a low H1. I felt this subject definitely increased exponentially in difficulty. If you have a moderately strong background in math, the first few topics/weeks are easy (i.e. vectors, acceleration and forces). However, every week is a new topic and soon enough you become bombarded with content and formulas that mean almost nothing to you. During lectures, I can recall sitting through atomic physics or circuits lectures trying to figure out what the heck is going on. It was also somewhat unfortunate that they would require you to visit the live lecture for a few worked out solutions, but not too bad since at least they allowed you to attempt it first (and with some googling, you could probably figure it out yourself). I did not bother looking at the textbook (other than for practice questions) since there was simply too much, but I did find that Khan Academy and other online sources did help for explanations and some solutions. Because of the density of content as well, by the end of the week, you tend to forget previous content (but I suppose the content density is unavoidable considering there is so much physics foundations to learn within only a semester). However, it did seem as though nearly all of the examinable content was in the lectures. I was informed that this might be a new version of the subject, so you might need to check with professors in case you find content that is completely new in practice questions or quizzes (they should be rare anyway), or you could take it as a challenge and widen your physics knowledge. I can only assume that these rough edges will be ironed out soon enough. The Workshops I found alright, but I only went for the first few, and then if I found the content of the week too difficult to digest. The lab work was alright but very fast paced based on my experiences (as there was a format and sections you were expected to complete within the session). Unfortunately, we were also required to leave our lab books in the lab, so we wouldn't get to see how well we did based on our criteria until the next lab session. The homework quizzes were definitely useful, as they would force you to do at least some questions every week, and apply your knowledge. It is also possible to get 10/10 for all of them, so they can help offset your marks somewhat if you think you will not do to well in the labs or exams. However, I did feel that they were watered down versions of questions you would find in the exam. The practice exam questions the professor's provide you are also very useful, and I advise you to do all of them to get a feel for the questions and an idea of what to expect (certain skills you develop in the weekly quizzes may not be enough for the practice exam questions, they also introduce written responses which are important to get a hang of). As for the exams themselves, they were at home and open book. If you have made yourself comfortable with the formula sheet and made a decent note document you should be fine. Personally, I created my own formula sheet (added variable names, unit conversions and some new formulas that may be useful all categorized by topics, since some of the questions require you to combine formulas), and since I was able to refer to notes I wasn't too stressed on memorizing details (it would have been difficult anyway with the content density). All in all, its definitely possible to get a H1 with effort, but due to how fast paced and dense the subject was, it'll definitely pose difficulty.

Great introduction to basic physics for people who didn't do VCE physics. Interesting questions in lecture slides which also include jokes/cartoons. Cool demonstrations during lectures if on campus. Lab work isn't too difficult or stressful. (Review written as a tutor for Sem 1, 2021.)