Some thoughts on CELS191

This (more so than HUBS) is a paper where you really do need to know everything the lecturer covers in a lecture. Thankfully this is an easily manageable amount of material. CELS tests both breadth and depth – you have to know the difference between cristae and cisternae, but you also have to be able to explain in general terms the method and uses of DNA profiling.

The first thing I would like to cover is the matter of the GLMs. These are not like the HUBS GLMs – these are hard. You will probably get the 1st GLM before the mid-semester exam. I suspect you will do better in the mid-semester exam if you have at least had a good look through it and the associated material, as it does reinforce the lecture material quite well. The second GLM sucks. The actual booklet has been done quite well but the 2009 assessment (a blackboard test) was nasty. I know of only one person in my year at Carrington who got an A+ for that test (and it wasn’t me). One of the questions was “which 3 of these 6 diseases would an unvaccinated first year university student be most likely to get?”. At first this seems somewhat attractive, but no one at my hall could work out the answer. I would later ask my Mum (a GP) what she thought the answer was. She disagreed with my Dad (also a doctor) and one of my friend's parents (another GP). So, what did I learn from this? Do not expect to get the full 5% for both GLMs. This is fair enough – you already get a free 10% from the BETs, so another free 10% would be excessive. Do not even expect to get at least 4.5% for each GLM, and accept this early on. Still work very hard at the booklets and consider the test questions carefully – quite a few of us still got the full 5% for the first GLM, though we had to be very careful when selecting our answers to do this – but don’t blow things out of proportion. For us the assessment for the 2nd GLM was in the 2nd to last week of lectures when we really should have been studying for the exams. Instead a few of us ended up spending hours trying to work out the correct answers to the test and analysing previous attempts by other people to find the pattern. In the end all this work gained us maybe 0.2-0.3% towards our final grade – we’d have been far better off fully completing the booklet well before the test became available, having a good careful attempt at the test, accepting that that was as good as we were going to do, and then spending the rest of the week studying towards the final exam. I think a key lesson here is that to get an A+ for a paper you don’t need to get an A+ in every individual component. Sure I would have lost 0.2-0.3% if I hadn’t done all that work in the week of the GLM assessment but I think that had I spent that week instead studying for the final exam I may have gained an extra 1% towards my final grade there.

The next thing is that you will get study questions, complete with model answers. Treat these like gold in your exam prep. These questions are in the style of the short answer component of the mid-semester/final exam and in many cases are just old exam questions. Use them to test yourself, and the model answers to see what sort of mark you would have gotten (and mark yourself harshly – do you trust the CELS staff to mark kindly?). Traditionally people lose quite a few marks in the CELS191 mid-semester test. I think this is due to two main things – firstly they don’t realise that the lecturers will ask questions on minor details, so they don’t learn those details. Next thing they know they are confronted with a question (often MCQ) on something they hadn’t learnt. Secondly they don’t approach the short answer questions properly. For all its faults (and there definitely are some), CELS191 produces very well-written exams, and this can lull you into a false sense of security. People lose marks in the SAQs because a) they don’t read the question and b) they don’t realise that CELS exams are marked quite differently from school exams. This is why I would advise making good use of the study questions – they will help stop you from making these mistakes in the actual exam. In terms of learning all the minor details, well, there’s no real secret there, but I have warned you now that you need to know everything covered in a lecture, so you just have to learn it.

On this note of what to learn and what not to learn in CELS, I wouldn’t worry too much about the textbook readings. They say they are examinable but I reckon this is just to get you to do them (and they are pretty interesting sometimes). Sometimes a lecturer will explicitly tell you to learn something in the textbook – in which case it is examinable. Sometimes a lecturer will just give you a whole chunk of the textbook (sometimes a whole chapter) – I would say it is highly unlikely that they will test you on a minor detail from here, and in this case I reckon the reading is just specified if you want something to support the lecture content. I personally don’t recall any exam questions in 2009 where the textbook would have helped beyond clarifying something covered in the relevant lecture.

Oh, and also, the past exam papers are really good resources for CELS191. Before 2007 the paper was called BIOL111, so there are heaps of past papers available. Not only do these provide good practice questions, the fact that CELS has been known to repeat questions (MCQ and SAQ) means that you may find yourself unexpectedly advantaged when you are sitting in the exam and see a question you’ve already done. The final exams from 2007 and earlier also contain the equivalent of past mid-semester exams (because the course wasn’t divided up between the two exams then), so this doesn’t just apply to preparing for final exams. Furthermore, the CELS staff will tell you they don’t release model answers to past exams. This is true, but in 2009 I did the 2008 exam for practice and then took it into the CELS office to look over with a teaching fellow. From that I discovered that there are model answers/mark schemes out there and if you go into the CELS office having already done the relevant questions you may just be able to see them.