Grade: 94. For context I did this subject along with Human Physiology and Principles of Human Structure. So prior to doing this subject I read the reviews here on StudentVIP and thought I was in for a bad subject. I thought Human Phys would be the saving grace and that this subject would be the problem child but boy was I wrong (you can probably identify my review for Human Phys lol). So at the start of the semester you randomly get allocated into groups and you'll probably get a mixed bag honestly. You end up getting really close to your peers as you spend 12 weeks together, slogging through practically all the assignments as a team as well as coordinating practicals. The first few assessments are pretty much free marks, you do them as a group although they are due at the end of the class so you lowkey gotta lock in during the workshop time to get them done. But really pretty much every group got 98%+ for the 3 in class assignments as far as I am aware. Then you have these little quizzes which you do at home. They are pretty free, just watch the pre-tute videos and maybe attend the tute (the latter isn't necessary to be honest) and you'll do well on the quizzes (they have no time limit). The purpose of the tute and quizzes are really just to prepare you thoeretically and practically for the actual practical. The actual practicals themselves aren't too bad. The lab manual they give you legit holds your hand through the entire thing and even if you can't follow it the demonstrators are actually so good and they will LITERALLY (not metaphorically) hold your hand to make sure you get through the stuff. As a side note, when doing the practicals, PLEASE remember to save your files as .acq if that's still a thing for the semesters to come. My group finished later than everyone, 2 times we finished 30 mins after class finished because we didn't save the files properly. Now the individual research assignment is an interesting one. A ton of my group members said it was the lowest mark they had ever received at UniMelb. I didn't think it was that bad, sure Melody is marking it and I think she is a harsher marker, but if you legit follow the rubric to a tee you shouldn't be getting docked that many marks. It's mainly just things like design an experiment, what is your hypothesis etc. Do be careful to include all the stuff they talk about in the tutes and in the practical though because they are very specific about what they want (e.g. ensure you talk about the species of participants in your hypothesis). The 2 post-prac reports are a DIFFERENT story. These things will spike your cortisol to insurmountable heights. I think a part of it is that they aren't that specific about what they expect from you. Also Melody is good at responding to stuff on EdDiscussion but often if you ask a question too late it won't be until a few hours before the assignment is due that she will respond so if you have questions you really gotta try to ask them early (better if you can do it in the flesh at practicals or tutes). A huge tip I can give is to write down all the demonstrators' pearls in the notes section of your lab manual. They are the ones who mark your post pracs so if they're giving you little hints you must use them. It got to the point where I based my responses OFF the hints they gave. Now a lot of other reviews here say that the post-pracs are marked harshly. I don't think so, if anything my demonstrator marked me way too nicely. Huge shoutout to my demonstrator Flora who is way too sweet and literally sugercoats all the errors in your reports. One thing though is that for these post pracs, you really want to conceptually understand what is going on in the pracs to then give good responses. What you're SUPPOSED to do is consolidate the content from Human Phys first (either from having done it previously or doing it concurrently with research based phys) and THEN apply that knowledge in the practical scenario. Do NOT do what I did which is learn the content AFTER writing the post pracs. Turns out that writing the report helped me understand the Human Phys content better lol, when really you should be doing it the other way around. My last tip for the post pracs (other than following the rubric to a tee) is to CHECK with your peers. If you have a good group then this is the prime time to be collaborating. You end up using near-identical graphs anyway so work as a team and get through the questions. My group didn't have this chemistry so I ended up cross-checking with my mate who's left his review in the one below mine lol but the point is that corroborating your answers with someone else will alleviate so much stress around 'do I need to include this or not'. For the 2nd post prac they required you to draw a LOT of flow charts and I deadass spent 10 hours making mine, and this was excluding all the other questions (this was the same with all my group mates). If I didn't collaborate I would've spent an additional 10 hours on this probably, because there were simply so many ways you could have gone about it. The final assignment I actually found pretty chill. Unlike the post pracs which are ambiguous, it is PRETTY CLEAR what you need to do for this assignment. It WILL take you ages to wrap your head around what you're ACTUALLY experimenting (like what you're trying to achieve with the 4 aims Melody devises). Just by revisiting the report every day you'll eventually get it, with the demonstrators' advice eventually you will come up with the right hypotheses (coming up with the right hypotheses is actually 30% of the assignment as this determines what you write about and what results you zone in on). You get a different marker to the one who's been assessing you all semester which is a bit weird. Look THIS is the one where you want to discuss your reasoning with teammates. Your results and methods sections are literally submitted as a team and there is a peer review so you better be on your best behaviour. Melody is a huge help in this section, she will often give a list of tips so really note them down. There are also sample figure legends and result scripts in the lab manual so you may as well copy these templates. All in all it's really not that scary, it's just like your typical report where you discuss the theory behind your results, gaps in literature as well as limitations. Nothing ground breaking really. I will say that the demonstrators again give you TONS of tips which you MUST use. The demonstrator giving you tips is potentially the one marking your final assignment. Did I mention that you can submit drafts? This is so good, and an easy way to boost your mark. IMO, the protocol for the final assignment should be, watch all the necessary tute stuff to grasp what the intro, results, discussion, conclusion etc. require (and follow the rubric to a tee, which thankfully is super detailed), COMPLETE your drafts and then fix all the stuff the marker wants you to fix. You can almost guarantee a good result doing this. There's an option to do peer review feedback but come on it's legit another kid marking your assignment. My reviewer was absolutely roasting the living daylights out of my intro whereas my Canvas marker's feedback was like 10x more positive lol. I reviewed some other reports and I was shocked to see that for the results draft, people were deadass only submitting plans or doing like individual paragraphs for the 'easier' ones i.e. the limitations and summarising results paragraphs and leaving out the comparison with literature paragraphs. Do NOT do this, this is literally your chance for the assessor to tell you what is and isn't good, submit all the paragraphs even if you think it's bad. I get that the report is 2500 words +/- 10% but trust me that completing all these drafts on time and with effort will pay DIVIDENDS. Also 2500 seems like tons, an 800 word intro and 1400 word discussion seem enormous but it's really not lol with how much there is to discuss. You can definitely do well in this subject but I don't think anyone will be stress-free when doing it. My biggest tips are: 1) compile all the little hints Melody and the demonstrators give and ensure you use them 2) aim to get started on assignments early so that if you have questions you can ask them early so you're not relying on EdDiscussion to get answers that might come a bit later than you'd like 3) build good rapport with teammates or, more unideally, at least have friends you can discuss everything with. A good group will make your experience in this subject SOO much better I can't even quantify it Melody is an excellent coordinator, way better than some others that I know *cough* Human Phys *cough*, the demonstrators are amazing and overall I'd definitely recommend this subject. Only 1 star off because some of the post-pracs can be ambiguous in what they want, and if you don't get a good group it makes the subject just that bit tougher.

Grade: 93. This subject I took at the same time as phys20008, which was very useful, as the content often overlapped with each other. Each week there is a 3 hour workshop/prac session, which is often time-pressured, and you are randomly sorted into a group with other students. This makes one's experience of the subject very luck-based, as if stuck with bad group members, the final report and each week becomes a slow burn as you have to ensure that everything is done well. But of course the opposite also applies. There are lots of assessments for this subject, but on the bright side, there are no lectures. There are only "pre-tutorial videos" which you should watch, which I find are often a bit windy and confusing. The tutorial is not worth attending, as often there is not much relevant content covered and very rarely is there important info said during it. I have to admit that the practicals were fun and you really develop a bond with your classmates when you see them every week. Also, the lab manual that is given is very very very detailed, so detailed such that to do well during the practicals you shouldnt think and should just follow the instructions line by line because they are so comprehensive. This saved me so much stress and made the practicals like following a recipe which worked well. The assessments in this subject are something else entirely. There are 4 big writing assessments, an individual assessment, two post prac reports, and the final report. For all the assessment, write with the rubric right beside you, this is the most important advice I can give. The post-pracs were stress inducing to the max, and be sure to ask ur demonstrators abt them all because they will often tell you the right answer. The final report was very challenging, but importantly, you get to submit a draft of each section before the final submission. This draft is CRUCIAL, because the demonstrators give detailed feedback, so make the most of it. During the last workshops, ask the teachers as many questions as possible, they are there to help. Overall, a great chance to make friends due to the nature of the subject, very hands-on, challenging assessments (but builds good skills), but also very stress-inducing in the moment. Undeniably the skills this subject develops will prove very useful in future research, and of course, is a requirement for those who want to pursue the physiology major.

I love a practical subject! The final assignment was a lot of work but they baby you through the whole thing and you can basically get demonstrators to edit the whole thing before you submit, and it taught me a lot about research paper writing. A lot of the repetitive parts of research are completed with your group so you don't even have to write the whole thing. I ended up with a 97% on the final assignment and an 89% overall!

I've had more mental breakdowns in this subject than all of my past subjects combined, and we're not even up to the final assignment yet 😭 like I've definitely learnt a lot of useful skills and the demonstrators are so lovely but oh my god I wish it wasn't a prereq for physiology UPDATE: wound up getting an 85 lmao so it worked out in the end, but let me tell you that this subject caused me IMMENSE stress and I'm forever traumatised by research subjects... It was rlly commendable how they let you upload drafts for feedback (the feedback could've been more targeted tho ngl), and by the end I had improved SO much in terms of my understanding of how research is conducted and how to write lab reports! Still can't in good faith recommend this subject to anyone who isn't forced to do it for the phys major and/or is rlly passionate about research because it is just so taxing and requires way too much effort for what it is. If you're able to underload when taking this subject, please please please do so.

This was overall a very fun an enjoyable subject. Mel is an absolute gem and the subject is very organised, making it a quite pleasurable experience. The people who struggled the most with this subject treated it as a throwaway and didn’t pay attention to much of the content until the assignments were due. The work is more than manageable if you keep in top of it by doing the pretute activities and watching the tutes. There are a lot of small assignments worth small amounts that require a decent amount of work, but if you put aside enough time to do them they become really useful practices for the final report task. The social aspect of this subject was my favourite part of the semester; spending three hours with people for twelve weeks really makes you get close to them. Overall, a subject I would definitely recommend. Give the assignments the time they deserves and you will undoubtedly do well in it.

Grade: 89 - Pretty good subject, the demonstrators are very helpful but its not an easy subject and the workload is high. If you get a good group it should be a good experience though. The assignments are marked harshly but the demonstrators drop a lot of answers in class so make sure you pay close attention.

Extremely well taught and coordinated, but unbelievably boring. Every little mistake is penalised harshly (eg not italicising individual letters or words). This means you end up spending most of your time in this subject learning how to format information correctly rather than actually learning about physiology. To be fair, the staff for this subject go above and beyond to help out, and it's not their fault that they have to be so pedantic. At the end of the day, research is always going to be dry and technical

Good subject, I learnt highly valuable skills important for research. The content was interesting, and the final assignment engaging. However, the workload for this subject is insane. I have completed my degree, and this subject was harder than all of my 3rd year subjects combined. The weekly EOS assignments are much much too difficult, and way too long. I also feel they are very harshly graded. The final assignment was also a lot of work, but I feel it was much more fairly graded (mine was at least), I have heard that quite a few people do not feel this way however. I would recommend only doing this if it is part of your major, or you want to go into research

Workloads were EXTREMELY crazy. DON'T take this subject if you don't have to. The quality of teaching was quite good, and the contents were interesting especially when you take phys20008 concurrently you get to see things you've learned happen in real life. Angelina is great But it feels like 5x harder than phys20008 as you have lots of reports to write, and a huge final assessment (research paper in the style of the journal of physiology). I put similar efforts in both phys20008 and phys20009 and screwed up the latter badly. Got low H2B in phys20009 and high H1 in phys20008. I am not even sad seeing my mark I am just glad that it was over.

Not a good subject. I don't comment on subjects like this, and usually I understand that the grades I get are a reflection of my effort, but in this case I can honestly say that I felt cheated. After physiology in semester 1 (PHYS20008), I was really excited for it, but this kind of killed physio for me. I worked so hard for this subject and in keeping up with weekly submissions, but its hard to not feel like you're drowning with the amount you have to do. It's easily the most overwhelming subject I've done so far, and it's not even like the EOS assignment was the hard part - there is constantly so much to do and so much to prepare for and learn (in terms of techniques and report writing), I feel as though my grades for my other three subjects suffered because of it. Assignments were really quite harshly marked and while my demonstrator was really sweet, I felt as though I was being told different things by different people. As for the final assignment, the feedback every week seemed to be helpful to begin with, and I corrected my mistakes accordingly, but my mark on my final was extremely harsh. I really don't think it reflected what I'd done. Also, the demonstrator that marks your final assignment is different to the demonstrator you've been with for entire semester? It's supposed to take away potential biases in marking, but it made zero sense to me? You spend the entire semester refining your submissions and work to the standard of your particular demonstrator, then you're marked terribly by somebody else in your final who has completely different standards. I can honestly say the communication between the demonstrators and coordinator was terrible. There should be some form of standardisation with this subject across markers, but there wasn't. Furthermore, Angelina was extremely unprofessional in how she communicated with me in emails and in her comments at the end of the semester- essentially gaslighting me. Take this subject if you have to I guess, but be wary of it.