LIFESCI 3
Introduction to Molecular Biology
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, 75 minutes. Enforced requisites: course 2, and Chemistry 14C or 30A. Corequisite: course 23L (students must take 23L concurrently with course 3 if they do not plan to take course 4). Introduction to basic principles of biochemistry and molecular biology. Letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
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Most Helpful Review
Spring 2016 - Dr. Sellami co-taught this with Dr. Campbell, and they each taught half of the course. I believe she handled all of the logistics and grading, though, so the only part of this review that applies to Dr. Campbell is the "Lectures" section. As People I didn't go to their office hours, but they seemed nice. A lot of communication occurred through the Piazza discussion forums, and that was a great resource through which the students, TAs, and LAs (undergraduate assistants) collaborated to get questions answered. The professors didn't answer as many questions as they could have, but they provided input on our most pressing questions. Materials Launchpad: $120 if you buy from the company *Don't buy/rent the textbook. You'll have readings, but you won't be studying from them. If you do want it, rent it from Amazon for $20.* Grading Midterm 1 100 Midterm 2 100 Final 200 Discussion 100 Clickers 78 Reading 100 Launchpad 100 Straight scale (90=A, 80=B, 70=C). No curve, but "I rounded generously (so more than mathematically correct...) in students' favors as much as I can justify[.] generally, if you were less than half a percent off from the better grade, you got the better grade[.]" Lectures She made lectures mandatory through clicker questions. You got 1.5 points just for inputting answers, and another 1.5 for getting three right (0.5 each). There were usually a lot of questions, which served as useful checkpoints. That being said, she was good at engaging us and speaking clearly. Dr. Campbell, not so much. He was your stereotypical professor who had little charisma. I tried giving him my full attention, but his voice was just too soft and disengaging. They both used PowerPoint uploaded onto CCLE, so a laptop was helpful. Discussion Instead of having a TA drone at you for 75 minutes, we did worksheets in groups, which allowed us to stay engaged and work at our own pace, making the material easier to digest. Homework Launchpad was a pain. A typical weekly assignment consisted of textbook pages and a quiz, videos and a quiz, and a simulation. They typically took a couple of hours per week, and were always due on the first day of class for the week. Even if there was a midterm on Monday, it would still be due then. I'll admit that the simulations made some concepts clearer to me. Exams 50 MC for the midterms, 100 MC for the final. Although there were a fair amount of memorization questions, the others were tricky because she focused on applying the experiments that we learned about. For example, we all know that DNA is the genetic material rather than protein. In class, we'd learn about the experiment that led to that conclusion. On the exam, she would describe an experiment like that one, but change the results so that they would suggest that protein was the genetic material instead. That would be the correct answer. So, you cannot rely on just pure memorization. The medians are listed below. Midterm 1: 82 Midterm 2: 84 Final: 152 (76%) Tips - Don't read the textbook thoroughly. It won't help for the exams. Just do enough to ace the reading quizzes. - Only study from lecture and discussion. The discussion worksheets always have questions that will appear in another form on her exams. - Sometimes you'll overthink a question, but most of the time you won't be. The wording is very important. tl;dr Dr. Campbell was a painfully average lecturer, but the first midterm, which covered his part of the course, wasn't too difficult.
Spring 2016 - Dr. Sellami co-taught this with Dr. Campbell, and they each taught half of the course. I believe she handled all of the logistics and grading, though, so the only part of this review that applies to Dr. Campbell is the "Lectures" section. As People I didn't go to their office hours, but they seemed nice. A lot of communication occurred through the Piazza discussion forums, and that was a great resource through which the students, TAs, and LAs (undergraduate assistants) collaborated to get questions answered. The professors didn't answer as many questions as they could have, but they provided input on our most pressing questions. Materials Launchpad: $120 if you buy from the company *Don't buy/rent the textbook. You'll have readings, but you won't be studying from them. If you do want it, rent it from Amazon for $20.* Grading Midterm 1 100 Midterm 2 100 Final 200 Discussion 100 Clickers 78 Reading 100 Launchpad 100 Straight scale (90=A, 80=B, 70=C). No curve, but "I rounded generously (so more than mathematically correct...) in students' favors as much as I can justify[.] generally, if you were less than half a percent off from the better grade, you got the better grade[.]" Lectures She made lectures mandatory through clicker questions. You got 1.5 points just for inputting answers, and another 1.5 for getting three right (0.5 each). There were usually a lot of questions, which served as useful checkpoints. That being said, she was good at engaging us and speaking clearly. Dr. Campbell, not so much. He was your stereotypical professor who had little charisma. I tried giving him my full attention, but his voice was just too soft and disengaging. They both used PowerPoint uploaded onto CCLE, so a laptop was helpful. Discussion Instead of having a TA drone at you for 75 minutes, we did worksheets in groups, which allowed us to stay engaged and work at our own pace, making the material easier to digest. Homework Launchpad was a pain. A typical weekly assignment consisted of textbook pages and a quiz, videos and a quiz, and a simulation. They typically took a couple of hours per week, and were always due on the first day of class for the week. Even if there was a midterm on Monday, it would still be due then. I'll admit that the simulations made some concepts clearer to me. Exams 50 MC for the midterms, 100 MC for the final. Although there were a fair amount of memorization questions, the others were tricky because she focused on applying the experiments that we learned about. For example, we all know that DNA is the genetic material rather than protein. In class, we'd learn about the experiment that led to that conclusion. On the exam, she would describe an experiment like that one, but change the results so that they would suggest that protein was the genetic material instead. That would be the correct answer. So, you cannot rely on just pure memorization. The medians are listed below. Midterm 1: 82 Midterm 2: 84 Final: 152 (76%) Tips - Don't read the textbook thoroughly. It won't help for the exams. Just do enough to ace the reading quizzes. - Only study from lecture and discussion. The discussion worksheets always have questions that will appear in another form on her exams. - Sometimes you'll overthink a question, but most of the time you won't be. The wording is very important. tl;dr Dr. Campbell was a painfully average lecturer, but the first midterm, which covered his part of the course, wasn't too difficult.
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Most Helpful Review
Dr. Cheng is a wonderful professor. He has a very thick accent. It can be kinda hard to understand. I laughed SO hard one time when he was talking about the "ARS" protein because it sounded like he kept saying....well, you know. But I guess anyone could mispronounce that. He is ALWAYS smiling and he is great to talk to after class and always open to questions.
Dr. Cheng is a wonderful professor. He has a very thick accent. It can be kinda hard to understand. I laughed SO hard one time when he was talking about the "ARS" protein because it sounded like he kept saying....well, you know. But I guess anyone could mispronounce that. He is ALWAYS smiling and he is great to talk to after class and always open to questions.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2017 - This is arguably the hardest class in this LS series. However, Dr. Fluitt makes her tests a lot easier than other professors do. She also includes a lot of "cushion points," such as participation points for clicker questions, for doing the Launchpad readings, and for going to discussion. Nevertheless, this class was still stressful for me because there was a lot of material and she had to go through the slides really fast to get through everything on time. So it was hard to follow and I had to go back and rewatch the lectures to understand everything. Her office hours are also very helpful, as she genuinely cares about her students' learning and she would give everyone an A if she could.
Winter 2017 - This is arguably the hardest class in this LS series. However, Dr. Fluitt makes her tests a lot easier than other professors do. She also includes a lot of "cushion points," such as participation points for clicker questions, for doing the Launchpad readings, and for going to discussion. Nevertheless, this class was still stressful for me because there was a lot of material and she had to go through the slides really fast to get through everything on time. So it was hard to follow and I had to go back and rewatch the lectures to understand everything. Her office hours are also very helpful, as she genuinely cares about her students' learning and she would give everyone an A if she could.
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I don't think she was as bad as the previous review stated. She mostly reads off her slides during lecture, which can get a bit old. She was nice enough to have all the lectures on Bruincast. Since there were 600+ students between her two lectures, all the tests were multiple choice-- which she had never done before. The two midterms were decent, but the final did not match the style of the first two tests. Broken into bits, LS3 is manageable, but there is a TON of information to know.
I don't think she was as bad as the previous review stated. She mostly reads off her slides during lecture, which can get a bit old. She was nice enough to have all the lectures on Bruincast. Since there were 600+ students between her two lectures, all the tests were multiple choice-- which she had never done before. The two midterms were decent, but the final did not match the style of the first two tests. Broken into bits, LS3 is manageable, but there is a TON of information to know.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2017 - I took LS 3 with her. Professor Khankan is a very kind person but don't be fooled. While her grading scheme is very generous (almost 50% of your grade is busywork) the simulations you had to do almost every week on launchpad were really difficult and it was easy to lose points there. The reading and video quizzes weren't too bad as you were able to pause the time limit and take all the time to find the answers online. She dropped your two lowest clicker days so I guess clickers points weren't too bad. Although the first 5 weeks of discussion everyone got full points, starting week 6 she suddenly threw in discussion quizzes 5 questions each week in which the questions sometimes were really specific and it was easy to lose a point because of that. Lastly, her tests had questions that were some of the trickiest I've seen in any multiple choice test so far and you had to really know the material to get a good grade. Because of her tests, her class is extremely difficult to get an A in. Overall, while I liked her lectures, she wasn't the best professor.
Winter 2017 - I took LS 3 with her. Professor Khankan is a very kind person but don't be fooled. While her grading scheme is very generous (almost 50% of your grade is busywork) the simulations you had to do almost every week on launchpad were really difficult and it was easy to lose points there. The reading and video quizzes weren't too bad as you were able to pause the time limit and take all the time to find the answers online. She dropped your two lowest clicker days so I guess clickers points weren't too bad. Although the first 5 weeks of discussion everyone got full points, starting week 6 she suddenly threw in discussion quizzes 5 questions each week in which the questions sometimes were really specific and it was easy to lose a point because of that. Lastly, her tests had questions that were some of the trickiest I've seen in any multiple choice test so far and you had to really know the material to get a good grade. Because of her tests, her class is extremely difficult to get an A in. Overall, while I liked her lectures, she wasn't the best professor.
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