I had Pires and Roth-Johnson for LS 2 in fall 2015.

Professor Pires does not seem to be good at teaching, although she is knowledgeable. She teaches very fast and a lot of her clicker questions are too tricky to understand during class. It is very important to relisten to bruin cast and review the lecture slides.

The homework problems are badly assigned. There are a lot of reading assignments and many of the readings have low consistency with the lecture and the exam. Some reading quizzes will test you some of these details and you don't have enough time to look for the information. The weekly quizzes are better.

The exams are actually fair. They are in multiple choice and true/false format and they focus on conceptual understanding instead of details and spellings.

She kept saying "Make the decision" (of dropping the class?) at the end of each week, making me uncomfortable. I also don't like her teaching styles. I will recommend people to avoid her, but the class is doable if she is teaching with another good professor. If she is the only option, I will probably wait for another quarter.

Overall grade: A- (studied my ass off)

Definitely do not procrastinate on studying/actually learning the material. Go to class, TA CLC office hours, and study clicker questions/the worksheets. Just going to the lectures sometimes wasn't enough. The midterms/finals were hard because you not only had to have a thorough knowledge of all the material, but also know how to apply them. Also, imo, launchpad wasn't too helpful because often times it was just an info overload. A lot of the material on launchpad was not on the midterms/finals so it's easy to study the wrong things

First, people tend to say this is the "easiest" life science course in the series, but I disagree. I think it's in par with the LS series especially considering that many of the ecology questions are interpretation questions rather than exact answers. The content of LS7B may be a hit or miss depending on your preferences. I personally find the class boring since I'm not to interested in ecology or genetics, so I was not too motivated.

I did mediocre or bad on both midterms, like a little below average and this freaked me out because I used to get 90s in LS7A. I studied a lot for the first midterm but I think I overburnt myself. I was very tired and made really silly mistakes on the actual midterm. I would recommend doing many genetics problems for the first midterm, but not excessively. For the second midterm, I think vocabulary and explaining key concepts is important. Make sure you can talk and explain a concept without looking at your notes. I did both of this things for the final, and I ended up doing fairly well, pulling myself to A- instead of a B+.

Overall, I recommend you attend all labs, get all the clicker questions, do all of the launchpad, and submit the evaluations to get the easy points. Like the entire LS series, you teach yourself everything through launchpad. Even if you did well on the course study a lot for the final since it can go both ways, hurt you or help you.

As for the instructor, I've had Pires for both LS7A and LS7B. She's an alright professor, but she tries to be intimidating and direct. The lectures were pretty boring , but I attended all of them for the clicker points (and the clicker questions help you study as well). I never went to her office hours because I had class, but if you do so I think she starts being a little nicer to you. She was rude to me and my TA when we interacted with her, but I don't really care enough. Sometimes when people asked her questions during her reviews, she would straight up say "I don't know ask me something else." She's not an encouraging professor, but I just focused on the work rather than the instructor.

A lot of the reviews here are making Pires out to be one of the worst professors at UCLA which is not true at all and I dare to say that most reviewers who gave her a negative score never took AP Biology in high school.

LS 2 is essentially AP Biology and if you know how questions are structured/worded on the AP test then you will more or less know how Pires sets up her tests. All of her questions are true/false or multiple choice and will require you to think about the biological processes. She requires a clicker so get ready to buy one and although many will consider her clicker questions to be "too hard" for lectures they are actually a little harder than the midterm questions so you will be more or less prepared for the midterm if you can answer them correctly. Launchpad work was annoying but ultimately easy points.

The grade I got does not indicate my overall grade in the class. It represents my midterm grade for her half of the class. Pires isn't a bad professor. I've heard that she's savage during office hours though.

I really disliked this class, which was surprising to me given what I heard going in. I decided to take Pires as she was rated hirer than Gilbert, the only alternative, bust was very disappointed in her and the class. Although the information and course content was fairly interesting and familiar to me based on my AP Bio experience, her teaching style, behavior, and class organization made the class a constant source of stress. The entire class lecture was mostly filled with clicker questions that were a challenging, but helpful source of exam preparation. However, every time we got to a difficult clicker question where over half the class got the answer wrong, Dr. Pires did not take the time to explain the correct and incorrect answers but rather ignored our confusion and continued ahead. This disregard for students was something I noticed throughout the course as Dr. Pires was rude and condescending toward student questions, something that was reflective in her office hours and review sessions being almost empty as they were not helpful at all. The first midterm was the most difficult of the three exams, all of which were redesigned this year and not seen by anyone but Dr. Pires. This made learning from my mistakes especially difficult as the TAs we reviewed the exams with often had little more ability to dissect the confusing and ambiguous questions than we did. The discussions themselves were a further waste of our time as we needlessly were required to show up in full PPE for two hours while we completed a worksheet that often did not help further my understanding of course content. The lack of autonomy given to TAs in these sections was a huge loss to students as my TA Mars was a such a great resource when we had the opportunity to ask questions and hear her go over concepts. I was further disappointed by the lack of transparency regarding how grades were distributed as well. Overall, I would not recommend taking this class with Pires, but if you do, the key to doing as well as I could at least for me was focusing on the CLC worksheets, clicker questions, TA office hours, and launchpad practice exam questions as those were the most helpful resources.

Everything the other reviews have said about Professor Pires and this class is still relevant. The material itself is not difficult, but the execution of her lectures and exams are awful. You can literally get by from only doing all the launchpad work and do well in the class, but participation is tracked by clicker points and is sadly required. Labs are also a requirement and just busywork. I also agree that midterms 1 and 2 are awful in their own way, and because Pires refuses to review her tests for mistakes or ask her TAs to check for her, the vagueness and probable misinterpretation of the test questions is just an added insult to injury.
However, Pires is somewhat lenient on the grading because although I mainly got B's on my tests, I still ended up with an A in the class. She also graciously offered to hold a review session for the final, but at 7AM and as a pretty useless Q&A session on simple test-taking strategies. If that doesn't tell you how little she cares if you succeed or not, then I don't know what else to tell you. Don't take the class with Pires if you can't help it.

Hated it lol. You basically can't come in with any prior knowledge of Biology. There were a lot of things that we had to learn only to pass the test because its basically backwards. she really doesn't answer questions. You really only went to class for attendance and the $100 dollar online textbook was where you actually learned.

LS7A was definitely not the easiest class I had ever taken. I had taken biology in high school and thought that it would be the same in college, but there’s much more depth to it. With that being said, my only complaint with the class was that I thought the tests were more difficult than they had to be. It wasn’t because of the material but because of the wording. Other than that, I thought Debra was fair. She can be direct sometimes, but otherwise she is quite kind. Going to lecture is important for more than just clicker questions. This practice is definitely similar to what you will see on the test, so may sure you take advantage of it.

I came into the class thinking that 7B would be very manageable. Turns out it was the complete opposite. Pires has a very condescending tone, and often would just start the clicker timers without telling the class, often not even trying to calm the class down. Her clicker questions were nothing compared to the difficulty of the midterms. The final seemed a bit more fair, but she had already wrecked all of us by then. 7B honestly ruined my view of ecology and genetics. I would avoid taking it with Pires if possible, but most likely you would have no choice. Just overstudy pedigrees and expect the midterms to be long and hard.

It's the 7 series. Lectures don't matter, you have to teach yourself the material through launchpad and just practice. The tests aren't really anything like the PEQ's, and the Pedigree problems on midterm one were really tough. Pires isn't super lenient when it comes to unclear wording of midterm questions. Lowkey the 7 series just needs to chill out, they have such a stick up their butt.