She is an awful lecturer. Her lectures are unorganized and she jumps from topic to topic, inserting side stories, so you don't know what's important and what's not. Her slides are hard to understand because she repeats the same figures several times in slightly different contexts and only puts a few words of description. Write down everything she says in class, even if you don't think its important, sort through it later when you are studying. Her tests are difficult because the questions are often unclear and she wants answers that she didn't specifically ask for. Tests require you to try to figure out what she was trying to get at more than knowledge of the material. The only way I learned in this class was looking up on Wikipedia all the important words from the slides. Studying for her tests was so painful because you can't tell what goes under which topic on her slides. It's not impossible to get a good grade, but you have to study the slides and do all the study guides she gives. The one thing that really helped was there are more possible points on the exam than it is graded out of.

One of my favorite professors at UCLA. Extremely knowledgeable and concerned about student learning.
I would def recommend her for LS3 (I don't think you should take her for LS1, considering how the subject is just not that useful for life science majors and she stresses too much minor details).

Pires is different from other profs because she stresses critical thinking instead of pure memorization. She expects you to understand the details, but what she really wants is for you to be able to take what you've learned and actually apply it in a lab setting. I think this class is very helpful for students who are research assistants in labs, it really teaches you to think critically.

Her tests are hard, but extremely fair. Pretty much all of the problems on the midterms/final (MC and short answers) have shown up in one way or another on her practice questions/handouts/study guides. It's really important that you do these seriously, and compare answers with a friend. She also holds review sessions once a week before class starts. And she is always available for OH, pretty much. For us she held office hours on the Sunday before finals week in her office when she was sick. That's how dedicated she is. Go to her with questions and she will answer them all for you. Most of the time she will even answer study guide questions, which is extremely helpful.

Her grading is more than fair, if you put in the effort. Participation (she uses clickers) and lab grades are pretty much half of your grade. And she puts in extra points on all the midterms. She doesn't curve usually unless it's absolutely necessary. TAs vary greatly. Mine felt sorry for us and pretty much gave full points on labs.

In terms of studying the book isn't helpful at all. She gets her materials from another book anyway. Her lecture slides and study guides are the most helpful. I would recommend listening to the podcasts again since she talks extremely fast.

Again, this class was hard work, but I enjoyed it a lot. If you are a serious life sciences student and is truly interested in molecular biology, definitely take Prof Pires :)

If you have a good TA in this class, you'll probably do fine. If your TA can't explain the concepts, you're screwed hardcore to the max. There in lies the imbalance to the class. The students with the better TAs automatically have an unfair advantage. This is especially important in Life Science classes where labs and discussions teach a large minority of the concepts. One of the best things you can do, however, to compensate for the discrepancy is make friends with students from other discussions.

Well, I just took a final - LS3 and I felt that it was very hard. I agree with a previous comments about the professor- yes, she is very engaging and good lecturer. However, the understanding of her lecture slides lectures often require information, that we either did not cover yet, did not cover at all or it would be mentioned somewhere in the future. it was not very organization of the lecture process.
If you do not work in the lab, as an assistant,then understanding of research methods ( making recombinant plasmids, or sequencing) mentioned in her lectures is not very helpful. Many slides are taken from Karp's molecular biology book.The book was helpful to understand this material better. I also felt, that worksheet problems should be similar, not identical to the midterm. Grading is very subjective, depending, if the grading TA likes your answer or not. And for the review- I believe that review session should be similar to Professor's Fain(LS2) reviews, when,TA covered the core material and brought to the students attention the KEY TERMS and DEFINITIONS.Then if you study- you know exactly how to structure your short essay. No need for guessing. I spent more time than others just reading and trying understand, what are they asking me? And of course,if you miss one of the key terms, or rephrase one- points are deducted. I believe that it was not fair to the students. We all study very hard in her class.
She is very interesting lecturer,definitely trying hard to make students think and apply material versus regurgitating.However, 2nd midterm, was all memorization. I felt , that course did not have a good structure. And definitely, not being available right before the exam - I do not know about that!!!!!!!-high school business.Clickers were not useful at all.She could of use them before modterm, during her review session for multiple choice part. That would work our better for both sides- professor will engage students and students will assess their knowledge. Really, how many of you in the real life would apply southern blotting to your practice??????
Good Luck to you all . If I would take it again,will prefer different professor. She has great TA (Christo and Steven)- that is for sure.
Yes, her reviews are helpful. Study material before you will go for the review.
Very hard class. My TA, was awesome.

I am absolutely baffled at the horrible ratings on this site for Deb. She is an absolutely amazing professor! I was quite hesistant to take Deb's class at first because of all the horror stories I've heard about her exams, but she really isn't that bad at all. First of all, her knowledge of biology is phenomenal--I learned so much from her. Her lectures can go a bit fast though, so it's really nice that she has podcasts so you can go back and listen to parts that you missed. If you don't understand the material, go to her office hours, which are really helpful. It's much easier to understand the material once you talked about it with her than to try to understand it yourself by reading the textbook. She is really nice and really tries everything she can to help you do well. Whether you'll do well or not depends on whether you take the opportunities she gives you. Deb tries to hold review sessions once a week before lecture, and those sessions usually consist of her going over the lecture material from last week and any questions that the students might have. I loved that her class emphasized applications rather than memorization because I hate memorizing a whole bunch of material without knowing what they're for or putting them to use. I'm not going to lie--it is not an easy class, and I really struggled for the first few weeks because I had no idea how the different lab techniques she talked about worked (I was really lucky to have started working in a lab this quarter, and being able to do all the techniques Deb talked about hands-on really helped me understand the material a lot more gradually). However, going to Deb's office hours and review sessions, and doing the worksheets and study guides she gives out for the exams really helped me learn the material. Her exams weren't too difficult--yes they're mostly short answers so they are a bit long, but they're really fair. There's no reason that you couldn't do at least average if you did all the practice problems that she gave you. The fact that she makes herself and the TAs unavailable a few days before the exam really forced me to study earlier, and I think that helped me a lot. I think I read from a couple of reviews that the average of the exams were like low 50s and 60s--no they're not!! (Or it could be possible that Deb's exams have changed since then). Our class averages for the midterms were around the 70s, which is really good. And she always throws in a couple of extra credit points in each exam, which is really nice. Definitely take Deb if you want to come out of an LS class learning something, and never forgetting it a few weeks later. Don't be intimidated by the reviews on here--most of them are way exaggerated!

Dr. Pires is a hypocrite. If you sit in the Geology library near the magazine shelves, you can see her chain smoking cigarettes every 10 minutes in the garden area in between the Geology building and Franz. I don't understand how she can teach us about life and evolution when she participates in one of the most degenerate activities known to humankind. Obviously the LS department fucked up when they hired her.

I think someone needs to write a good review here. She is a good professor. Her tests are hard but I don't know what everyone is expecting out of a LS2 class. You have to work hard and know your stuff inside and out and you will do relatively well. Her averages are low but if you study you will get a good grade. My only complaints, she sometimes does not respond back to emails and takes forever to do the grading! Besides that good professor. Take her clas you will learn a lot.

I took LS3 with Pires because the other lecture was full and so was every other class I needed to take. Now, I regret this decision to the bottom of my soul. First of all, I need to clarify that I am not someone who dislikes a professor just because his/her exams are difficult, I've taken Chem14D with Hardinger and loved him, despite his hard exams. Pires is someone COMPLETELY different. You know how professors give you past exams to prepare you for the actual exam? Yeah, she does that, except you don't get the answer key to those past exams and she makes herself and her TA's off limit at least 3 days before the day of exam. The TA's are all amazing people, I have Christo as my TA and for the first midterm, he actually made these worksheet full of practice problems (WITH answer key of course) for us to work on; he also gave these super helpful review sessions. But right before the second midterm, Pires ordered all the TA's not to make those worksheets anymore and not to host individual review sessions (because it "distracts" the students from lecture material), instead, all the TA's host one review session. What's even worse is that it can only be a QUESTION & ANSWER format. It was not very helpful unless you're done studying 4 days before the exam.
Her lecture is also not very organized because she jumps from topic to topic. She loves to use different diagrams from different textbooks to explain the same biological process, unfortunately, it gets very confusing because one textbook might not include a protein in the diagram, while the other might give a more general explanation of the process...etc.
Pires loves to say how she wants us to learn something that we can apply in the future, so we can walk out of the LS3 classroom learning something useful. Yes, you just MIGHT be able to do that, if you're willing to get a C in this class. She covers a lot of material in 10 weeks, and the difficulty level of her exams? It is so high that you just want to burst into tears while writing them. What makes everything worse is that the whole LS3 classroom is full of competitive pre-med students who probably take this class with her because they want to learn more and prepare for their MCAT. So don't be surprised to find a high class average for those unbelievably hard midterms.
All in all, I'd suggest you not to take this class with her. Pires once said that she's not the kind of professor who writes super hard exam questions so he/she can fail a portion of the student. When I heard her saying that, I thought, "maybe she's a nice professor after all". I was so wrong. I could not stop myself from cursing her in my head while I was working on the second midterm.

Do not take pires, bottom line. she is a good lecturer and knows what she is talking about, but that does not compensate in the least for her disasterous test-writing. her tests test on how well you can interpret her questions, not on how well you know the material (one classmate put it as "how well you read her mind"). Its frustrating and counterproductive: you'll spend more time arguing with your TA over your responses than clarifying the material.

Honestly, I would have rather stayed an extra year than taken this class with her. She makes u go to lecture because she uses clickers and u get points for them, so u must be in class. she reads off the slides that are posted on blackboard, so its not like they're super useful. and don't even get me started on the difficulty of her exams. OMG, you know when you walk out of an exam and u think "well I didn't get everything down but most of them and I'll get some partial credit for the retarded short answers she provides." yeah, NO you're wrong, you failed the exam. The short answers are graded ridiculously, you don't get partial credit, it seems like it was easier to add up the zero's for the grader so they didnt bother giving you partial credit. Oh god seriously, her exams make you want to pull your hair out. just save urself from the unbearable pain of 11 weeks with her and take it with somebody else, anyone else is better.