This is a fair unit. HD is very doable, especially with flashcards, good notes and the right amount of effort. Exam is 55%, two tests, first is 7% and second in 8% and a 15% research report. There are also 3 labs each worth 5% in Total. The first lab is a team building activities which are dumb and useless and I was literally dying from how boring it was. This lab was not assesed, the other 3 are much better. Despite all the criticism that lynnete (the UC) gets for being lazy and not proactive (all of which is valid), I must credit her for being very organised and active on the discussion board, practically always replying, even if her responses are often unhelpful. Unlike most units, I found the labs in this unit to actually be useful as they often reflected the lecture content and helped me enforce it. The labs each had a 1.5% closed book f2f prelab that was very reasonable and easy to get full marks for. The lab experiment/simulation was worth 3.5% and was very difficult and time pressured (except for the last lab) but very doable with the right group. The report was marked much more nicely than I thought and I know many people who got 90%+ for it. With that said, there was 0 guidance on what they want us to write for the report. You basically choose a drug and write about it. Test one was phrased poorly and the questions were vauge but still reasonable. Test 2 was clear. The final exam was very short so each question had a high weighting. I finished with over an hour to spare. The exam was very surface level. Must have been marked lightly because I thought I got a 70 but got a 90-ish. The exam was straight up weird! They recycled a whole page from the PHAR2210 exam which I have never seen happen before. Thanlfully, it was essentially free marks because those were recycled questions. Don't believe Ricky when he says "you don't need to know it".... Basically everything is assessable and for some reason, some phar2210 content is as well. This unit is far more interesting than phar2210 and I feel I learnt a lot. The cancer and diabetes lectures were straight up trash but otherwise the teaching was good. Overall verdict is this unit is very fair even if I enjoyed phar2210 more and I feel like I learnt a lot.

This unit is a manageable HD but you have to put in the effort to study the content regularly as someone who procrastinates and does not keep up with lecture content at all the times I was watching the lectures weekly reflected in my results.The 2 test were more specific, harder than the final exam which was quite superficial and you won’t get to see your marks from the tests either. A lot of the lecturers wasted time rambling on about things that weren’t needed. Develop a sound understanding of the Nervous system when you have a chance as everything always leads back to it. mnemonic + Ankis will be your best friend to remember the drugs and their affects if you’re struggling to keep up with all the drugs. Lynette is not the most useful unit coordinator and can give very vague advice. The Labs are easy and the first lab despite it saying attendance required does not go towards your Grades and is a waste of time. Coming from a seasoned procrastinator pls start your drug essay sooner, it’s not hard but definitely needs filtering and refining and will allow you to review and change your mind on certain paragraphs.

An easy HD, however there is more content than PHAR2210. The lectures sometimes went into depth about the human body, however none of the content were ever assessed beyond a superficial level. 2/3 of the labs were computer simulations, which was underwhelming, however they were easy to do well on since you could just collaborate with the people around you. The pre-lab tests just required you to memorise certain information from the lab handout (e.g. memorise the drug table from the handout) and were easy to do well on. Although Ricky emphasised that content from PHAR2210 is examinable, this wasn't really the case, aside from a few select examples that he specifically states in his lectures. Lynette responded to all discussion board posts, however sometimes she did not seem enthusiastic and some of her responses were not helpful. The research assignment was far easier than the one in PHAR2210, and I thought that it was marked very generously.

This unit is less enjoyable than PHAR2210. It involved mostly memorising sets of drugs and explaining their mechanism of action. The research essay was much easier than PHAR2210, especially since I could pick a drug I wanted to research. The tests were relatively easy. The lab assessments were annoying, and it felt like I was just rewriting the same thing over and over again. The final exam was easy and broadly assessed your knowledge of drugs in the unit. Overall, it is a solid unit.

4 stars because it's a great core unit, don't recommend as an elective though (1 star off for being kind of content heavy). The other reviews stress that the amount of drugs to memorise is very daunting, but somehow it was manageable. There's probably only 4 to 7 drugs taught in each lecture, so just memorise them as they come and by the end you would have covered the drug mountain without even realising it. Majority of drugs are relevant to only one lecture, so it easy to group them. Only a handful of drugs are relevant to multiple lectures. Pre-labs had more content than PHAR2210 labs, but the labs themselves were still easy as pie. The pre-labs were actually useful, well organised and pretty short in terms of reading (1-2 pages), makes you very confident in understanding every part of the lab. Exam was MCQ and short answer, very reasonable questions. Has a 15% research essay about drugs in movies. Just pick a movie that involves a drug, research that drug, and relate your research to the movie, quite easy to do well in. There are also 2 lecture assessment tests at mid sem and end of sem, MCQ and short answer (but nothing more than writing one sentence). The tests are very straight forward after studying (got 100% in both) and studying for them pays off a lot for exam prep. Was scared to approach this unit at first but in hindsight a HD is very achievable if you put in the effort.

Need to put in quite a lot of effort. Personally, lots of extra researching was needed to thoroughly understand the content for some lectures. Exams are super early so please please start revising sooner than later. Make sure you ask questions in labs if you don't get it, don't be scared to, although the help you get may or may not be helpful. Don't waste time on the nitty gritty, understanding all of the general concept and mechanism/targets are more important. Despite everything, this unit is very interesting.

Mostly an easy HD, but may be challenging as there is a fair bit of content to go through, however the unit coordinator (Lynette) said that they've lowered the number of drugs to memorise down to roughly 130 in comparison to previous years. Unit has 24 lectures, however the last is pharmacology career opportunities and isn't assessed. Lecture content is quite easy to understand, but there is a bit of memorisation involved. Ricky covers all of mostly the second half of the lectures, and delivers them interactively with practice questions halfway through and at the end of each lecture. Lynette didn't seem particularly enthusiastic, and occasionally sent out informal emails to students. The in-semester tests are worth 4.5% and 5.5% each, which is barely anything in comparison to the three assessed 5% labs throughout the semester. The labs often require a bit of pre-learning beforehand, with roughly half of the lab's assessment being a short test completed before commencement. There's also a non-assessed teamwork building exercise at the start of the unit which is quite useless considering the labs are done in partners, yet the teamwork building exercise is done in trios, and the lessons learnt from the teamwork building exercise are quite useless and somewhat anti-scientific. Only one lab is a wet lab, which is a bit unfortunate. Exam is worth 60%, and a written assignment worth 15% to be submitted near the end of the semester means that you only end up getting 25% of your total mark back before sitting the exam, which is frankly unacceptable as it gives students very little clue how much effort they need to put in to achieve a HD, for those focusing on their GPA. Hopefully Lynette will move the submission date forward in future to prevent this from happening, but I doubt she'll be proactive enough to make such a change. The written assignment itself is very broad and allows you to talk about the pharmacology, generally speaking, of a drug of your choice. The assignment isn't too hard with normal marking it seems, however your maximum mark is what percentage of the word count you use, which is frankly just silly, especially considering you can't go over the limit without penalty either. Exam mostly assesses content at a superficial level, not requiring depth of understanding. Assessments have a heavy focus on the drugs, despite a lot of functional anatomy being part of the course, for example information about asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Ideally don't do this unit without doing PHAR2210 beforehand, as Ricky Chen frequently mentions things that "you will have learned last semester," despite PHAR2210 not actually being a compulsory unit (IMED2002 can be done instead). Some of the things mentioned as taught last semester are assessable, but didn't really show up in examinations.

Pretty content heavy unit with a lot of drugs to memorise although they did reduce the number of drugs you need to know from last year. The labs can be quite hard if you don't prepare well ahead of them as they require you to apply your knowledge of the drug to certain scenarios and there's a short pre-lab assessment before each lab that makes up almost half of the allocated mark for that lab session, these are relatively easy. There's only 4 labs with 1 of them being a teamwork workshop. It's not a very hands on unit as only 1 of the labs requires you to actually do any experiments. The online mid sem and end of semester test both assess a wide range of lectures but are only worth about 4.5-5.5% each which kinda sucks since you have to put in sm effort to memorise a lot of stuff but makes sense since theyre only like 20mins with around 20 multiple choice questions. The exam however is worth 60% and around 65% of the marks come from short answer so you do need to know the content fairly well to get a high score. Pretty interesting lectures and the lab staff and Ricky are very friendly and helpful too.

A really well organised unit, with some engaging lecturers. Content heavy as usual for pharmacology; this unit requires a lot of memorising drug names!