LSM1401 - Fundamentals of Biochemistry

Type: Core Module

Difficulty: Normal

Workload: Normal
Lecturer(s): Dr Kim Chu Young

Continuous Assessment: Weekly Quiz, E-practicals, CA1 and CA2

I took this module ahead of my peers, and I did not regret this decision. During this semester, the Prof that was teaching this module was Prof Kim Chu-Young. He's a korean prof, and you can see immediately that he's a super nice prof. The only drawback was that his lectures can be pretty boring and dry given his accent and lecture contents.

Lecture content was very similar to LSM1301, in fact it was a smaller subset of it.

In this module, we were made to memorize all 20 amino acids, their 3 letter and 1 letter codewords as well as their structures. I felt that was asking a little too much, but I did it anyway.

I'll talk about the modes of assessments below.

The weekly quizzes were simple. Every week he'll release a research paper or an article about a topic of interest related to biochemistry in one way or another. It's not part of the syllabus, but the prof aims to use these to let us see the applications to biochemistry. The quizzes are conducted on IVLE and require you to understand the research paper or article.

E-practicals were simply recorded powerpoint slides which "simulate" a real practical process. You watch videos of a person doing the experiment and you will be presented with collected data. Your job is to process it and come up with valid conclusions. In my opinion this was a rather cheap way of conducting practicals.

CA1 was simply a fill-in-the-blanks style and a couple of structure drawings to do. The most difficult question was the drawing of the amino acid chain. "Draw the chemical structure of the hexapeptide CANQWE at neutral PH". (10 marks, no partial marks awarded).

For CA2, he released a 57-questions problem set which are fully MCQ. Half of the questions will be from this problem set, and the other half will be questions from the topics DNA, ATP and Gene expression. He literally reduced the syllabus we had to mug for by 67%! It was because of this which I did pretty well during CA2 ^^

 * A Hint: Same hints as that of LSM1301 module review I gave above

Expected Grade: A

Achieved Grade: A