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!