Some thoughts on HUBS (191 and 192)

When you start HUBS (probably at your first lecture) you are likely to get a talk about “you are at university now, and at university we prize thinking and deep learning above all else. In our opinion you will take more out of this course if you take a deep learning approach rather than taking a surface learning approach and simply learning the facts presented in lectures”. I’m going to be blunt. This is bullshit. Even the HUBS staff know this. A couple of years ago the university did a study on HUBS and BIOL115 (its predecessor), and part of this investigated the role of deep learning in HUBS. They gave students a fairly reputable survey that aimed to find, for each of them, whether they took a “deep” or “surface” approach to learning. They then looked at the performance of those students in the HUBS192 2007 final exam. The result – students who took a “deep” approach performed worse in all three sections of the exam than those who took a “surface” approach. I kid you not – here's the link (http://www.springerlink.com/content/g14140836891971j/) if you don’t believe me. HUBS is right in that university should be about deep learning but if you want to do well in HUBS it’s a case of surface learning ftw.

This makes sense when you think about it too. Occasionally a HUBS test can throw in a nasty question that really does require some deeper sort of understanding (Angela McLean is particularly good at this – she may be nice and friendly in lectures but I have a feeling that she, along with Frank Griffin and Ruth Napper, is responsible for the most marks lost in MCQs. You have been warned), but for the most part introductory anatomy and physiology is about memorization more than it is about understanding. You either know that the three layers of the bladder wall are the adventitia, detrussor muscle (muscularis in two layers), and mucosa (containing transitional epithelium), or you don’t. You either know what the ductus arteriosus is or you don’t. You either know that the neuron membrane is most permeable to K+ at rest and that this is why the resting membrane potential is -70mV, or you don’t. There is nothing else to it – no “conceptual understanding”, nothing. While some of the underlying concepts in physiology may require a bit of though to understand, such understand is very rarely required in assessments. While some of the anatomy may require good spatial reasoning to fully grasp, this, once again, is very rarely required in assessments. The only exception is that there are sometimes patterns to the naming of anatomical structures, but these are far from predictable and I wouldn’t rely on them.

So yeah, if you want to do well in HUBS, you’re probably better off just learning all the facts – those stated on the lecture slides, in the handouts, by the lecturer, and in the textbook. By all means seek further knowledge and better understanding of important and interesting concepts (I myself did this on occasion and found it quite rewarding), but do not neglect the surface learning required of you. Do not neglect the basic facts that (annoying as it may be) you just have to memorise if you want to well in HUBS.

Another thing I can say is to take the GLMs seriously. The final assessment tests are piss easy. I reckon most people aiming for med would get a final mark of 100% on them even if you only got 1 attempt, yet you get 3! As a result it is tempting to ignore the questions in the booklet and just do the test, using wikipedia if you get stuck. I would advise against this. Not only is it a valuable revision exercise to do the whole book properly, but the final exam will have around 1-3 marks that test stuff covered in the GLM and nowhere else. Don’t be the person who missed out on that A+ by 1 mark because you didn’t do the GLM. When you’re trying to get into med every mark is valuable.

A final thing I’ll say - when it comes to pre-readings for HUBS I would strongly advise doing them. For starters you will take more out of the lecture if you are prepared. Perhaps most importantly for you, the reader though is that they are examinable. I don’t mean this in the way that CELS give you a whole fucking chapter to read for a particular lecture while warning you that it is examinable (yet it really is just to reinforce the lecture material – the truly examinable stuff – refer to my thoughts on CELS191). When you have John Reynolds covering neuroanatomy you will notice that he gives you a whole page detailing the pre-reading (sometimes referring to particular sentences). Why is he so pedantic? Because he carefully identifies what he wants you to know, finds the relevant stuff in the textbook, and tells you to read it. I speak from experience when I say that he does put stuff in the tests that is in the essential readings but is not explicitly presented in lectures.