Although students meet in person with the TA for the lab portion of this course, the lectures are posted online on a separate website. The lectures weren't entirely necessary for my overall understanding of the class, but they gave me a good idea of what to expect for the labs that week, and they were only about 30 minutes each. Despite taking this class during the summer, the workload was very light and manageable. Although the lab reports themselves, which we had 3 to complete, were time-consuming, my TA was very helpful and willing to answer all the questions I had. Once you get through the first lab report, you find the right methods to approach the other 2 reports and the process becomes easier. There were worksheets, but we were able to work on them in class with our lab group members, and we turned them in before leaving the class. This class was actually intriguing and enjoyable. We had the opportunity to sequence our DNA and even dissect a rat! I had a lot of fun in this class, and the quizzes/final were definitely not difficult and required just a few hours of study. I definitely recommend this class, and hopefully you get a helpful TA because they are basically the ones giving you your final grade.
* This class is not curved. Grades may be normalized if there are discrepancies in scores among different lab sections, but this rarely happens*

Grading Scheme:
Pre-lab quizzes - 6 points each x 9 = 54 points (-6 points from lowest score)
In-lab quizzes - 7 points each x 10 = 70 points (-7 points from lowest score)
Post-lab quizzes - 2 points each x 10 = 20 points (-2 points from lowest score)
Assignments - 259 points total (10 assignments)
Lab participation - 6 points
Evaluations - 6 points
Final - 100 points
Total - 500 points

Professor Pfuegl:
I never actually met Pfluegl in person because this class consists of watching videos with Pfluegl narrating and going to one 3-hour lab a week. The lab manual is basically mandatory. It'd be wise to get the new copy (4th edition) because it contains different material from the previous one. I heard rumors that he's a pretty big stickler for keeping everyone in lab for the whole 3-hours even if you're finished early, so that can be a bit of a drag. Otherwise, to be honest, the lecture videos are not really worth watching. You never get tested on the material covered. The essential stuff to know is in the lab manual. The videos just kind of give a wider scope and background of the week's lab. Even though I did watch them and take notes on them, you could probably do well in this class without even watching them at all.

TA Sara Ranjbarvaziri:
Sara was pretty nice in labs. Labs overall seemed really dragged out and involved a lot of waiting. Some of the labs could probably be condensed to half the time if they really tried. However, Sara was a really easy grader for lab reports. In the last report though, she graded a bit tougher because she got in trouble with Pfluegl for grading too easily. She's not strict about cell phone usage, but she is pretty stern about paying attention when it's important.

Pre-lab quizzes grade: 48/48
So before each lab you have to complete an online quiz on CCLE that contains a few multiple choice questions about the lab. These are really simple and they give you 20 minutes to complete. I just usually skimmed the manual for key words in the question without actually reading the lab.

In-lab quizzes grade: 61/63
These are pretty much the same deal as the pre-lab quizzes, except they're done on paper at the beginning of each lab. Sometimes the same questions pop up. I just quickly read through the lab manual right before labs. You get about 10-15 minutes to complete them, but it doesn't take that long.

Post-lab quizzes grade: 17.5/18
The post-lab quizzes sometimes make you recall things you did in lab, but you can usually just rely on the lab manual again to answer the questions on CCLE. They give you an hour for these quizzes, but again, it's too much time.

Assignments grade: 249.75/259
So most of these points were from in-lab worksheets you completed as you did the labs. These were pretty simple. Just got knocked off a point here and there. Another big part of the points for the assignments grade was 3 lab reports and a proposal. The first one was kind of a trail run and not worth a lot of points. I got 13.25/14 on it. The second one was worth more, and I got 39.5/40. At this point my TA was told to grade harder, so for the last lab report I got 36.5/40 and for the proposal I got 8/10. Sara basically graded our reports kind of like a checklist. If you included everything you should have, you got credit for it. They're pretty simple to write, but you get a week to complete each report, and the last report was tied in with the proposal, so you have to plan out how to complete them within the time frame accordingly.

Lab participation grade: 6/6
This basically involved just signing up for a question related to the next week's lab during the lab in the previous week. Then on the day of the lab when it was your turn you just gave a 30-second blurb. Sara graded it just that if you did it you got full credit. Really easy. Usually the questions can be answered just from reading the lab manual or watching a lecture video.

Evaluations grade: 6/6
You had to evaluate Professor Pfluegl, your TA, and your two UAs (undergraduate assistants who helped facilitate labs with the TA) to get full credit.

Final grade: 80%
The final was really really simple. It was 40 multiple choice questions that were similar in style to the post-lab quizzes. I recommend just going through the lab manual a couple time and the post-lab quizzes to study. That's all you need. They also gave a practice exam of the same fashion which was somewhat helpful. You schedule an hour to take the exam in the computer lab during finals week. But it really only takes 15-20 minutes to complete.

Overall grade: A
This class was really simple. Not a lot of work and easy assignments. Not difficult to take concurrently with LS 4. I recommend taking this class with Pfluegl.

Honestly Pfleugl was such a non-factor, you never really need to watch the lectures to do well and understand what's happening. Would recommend stocking up on as many past quizzes, quizlets, etc. as possible so you can make sure to get all of your quizzes 100% correct, especially the in-class ones so it can be a great buffer for the lab reports which are kind of time-consuming. My TA was Maria and she is literally one of the best science TA's I've had. This class was actually pretty enjoyable, ESPECIALLY in comparison to Chem 14BL which I hated. The rat dissection was super cool, as well as the histology and infectious disease labs.

Don't underestimate the final exam but overall fairly easy class. It is a lot of busy work and writing lab reports takes forever but on other weeks you only have to take the brief quizzes and just go to class so I guess it evens out in the end. Befriend your TA because they, solely, determine your grade.

LS 23L is pretty easy although it's one of the more annoying labs because everything feels tedious and purposefully drawn out. TAs will not let you out of lab early which will rarely happen because it feels like the labs are designed to maximize your time in lab for no real reason.

Workload is pretty light. You have a pre, in lab, and post quiz for every lab, three major lab reports, and a research proposal. They're all easy it's just that the TA can be really picky and take points off. I didn't do amazing on the lab reports but I still managed to get an A in the class. I would not underestimate the final. People say it's really easy and while they aren't wrong it can be tricky.

The most difficult part of the class are the reports. Just try to have a very specific Hypothesis for the experiments.
Don't forget to follow the direction of the writing (given). Write the report as if a third person has done the experiment and you were watching the experiment.
Do not forget to include units for your data. Basically for all the numbers in your report there should be a unit. Try to write down the appropriate Unit during the experiment in your labbook.
Learn the general idea of one tail and two tailed t-test statistics.
I'll update this review to more specific guidelines soon.

Even though it’s all busy work, you get all these easy points. The only slightly difficult things about this class were writing CPR reports and then the final.

I am selling my lab manual for $20, contact me at ************* .

Okay, real talk here. This class is very manageable, even though 3 hour labs in themselves can be tedious/frustrating, especially because the LS department doesn't let students leave labs more than 10 minutes early. But that being said, these labs can be quite interesting and engaging, far more than Chem 14BL. I mean, you can figure out your maternal ancestry/haplogroup, dissect a rat, and generally get real/applicable information. It's straightforward, it's helpful, and if you actually like LS, it should be relatively engaging. What's not to like?

I will echo what someone said in the past that you can BS the hell out of this class. Online lectures are honestly skippable. In-lab quizzes are taken from the same pool of questions as pre-lab questions that they haven't changed for years, which can virtually all be found on Quizlet (there was literally one, maybe two exceptions I noticed over the quarter because they started calling chloroform PopCulture and changed a question about that but you can drop one quiz each from in-labs, pre-labs, and post-labs so it didn't even affect me).

They tell you everything you need to know for the class and the labs while you're in-lab, so you can skim or even skip on reading the lab manual if you're desperate and just bug your Lab Assistants to help you out if need be. The only labs that could be helpful to prepare for are the rat dissection (which has a group quiz) and histology lab - they will want you to identify slides using educated guesses. Honestly, you should just memorize what they look like before lab and give explanations after the fact, especially if you have a terrible/uncooperative group. Then when you finish early, you can chill and work on other work.

So basically, from your quiz points, you should get 100% or near 100%. In-lab work you may lose a point or two sometimes, but it should be pretty insignificant as long as you follow directions. There will be freebie points too from evaluations and one discussion question that you'll take 2-3 minutes max to answer once over the quarter.

This leaves CPR and the final.

Dear god, do not assume that you'll get nice reviewers and that we'll all help each other out. People gave me 6s and 7s (out of 10) for nitpicky stuff even though an 8 or even 9 would have been very reasonable. Check Piazza for info, be clear in your hypothesis (distinguish the two groups being tested if it's people, be clear about the variable you're testing. If it's cardiorespiratory rate, don't say something vague like "physical fitness,") Don't give excessive detail for materials/methods in lab reports (assume people will know basic techniques and don't include locations of stuff that are specific to our LS23L lab rooms), use only like 2 graphs for summarizing data and do NOT give individual trial data or interpret the data in the Data section. Understand what paired vs unpaired t-test is, because you should specify this in the lab report. Make sure things are in the right sections, which will be clear in the rubric they give you. Then you should be getting 8-10s in your lab reports, and if there's a problem, complain to the LS23L department but be aware that they may lower the grade.

If you do this, you can finesse the final and get an A with ease. Check quizlet for practice final questions which will genuinely be very similar to the actual final. The lectures Pfluegl gives are actually too detailed oftentimes and they won't really test on that stuff so specifically. *Read the Lab Manual* and know details from there, though. If you check quizlet, you'll start to see patterns in how they ask questions. There are a couple major topics from each lab and they basically ask the same variant of question, so if you get the background idea, you'll be able to do the final. Remember lab procedures and the meaning of what certain instruments measure, too.

Not too tricky, but do not underestimate. I never understood what I was doing while doing the labs, but I caught up on everything the day before the final and I was fine.

If you do everything I say, you should have lost very few points by the time the final comes, so you won't even need a high score for an A. I did mehhh on one CPR, and I still had 22 points to spare for the final, meaning I could miss 8 questions out of 40 (2.5 points each) and still get an A.

OVERALL:
Pre-Lab Quiz: 40/40 (drop 1)
In-Lab Quiz: 40/40 (drop 1)
Post-Lab Quiz: 18/18 (drop 1)
Lab Safety Quiz: 15/15 (up to 3 tries, take best attempt)
In-Lab Assignments: 106/110
CPR Assignments: 156.226/165)
(#1: 18.496/20
#2: 54.6/60
#3: 83.13/85)
Final: 87.5/100
Discussion question: 6/6
Evaluations: 6/6
TOTAL: 474.726/500 or ~94.9%

Grade: A, minimum 465/500 or 93% needed for A

Good luck!!

Going to give you the most honest review here. I never read the lab manual or watched the online lectures for this class. For the quizzes, I relied solely on the quizlet. There are quizlets out there that have ALL of the pre-lab and in-lab quiz questions in them. The post-lab questions are a bit harder to get, but if you can get your hands on the LS 23L Final Question Bank, it's basically questions taken from there. The final exam consists of probably around 50% of questions taken from the past 23L Final questions in the Question Bank. The questions are very similar to the post-lab quizzes.
In lab, I basically went through the motions. I didn't know what the heck I was doing or why I was doing it. I just followed the instructions. To get full credit on the in-lab assignments, ask your UA questions!! They will help you!
As for the lab reports, use past labs as a guideline. The TAs will take off points for the dumbest of things! You'll see what I'm talking about after you get your 1st or 2nd lab report back. Basically, do not write in third person, do not include anything in the results section other than results (DO NOT EXPLAIN ANYTHING IN THIS SECTION, you will get points taken off!!), always include your null and alternative hypothesis, go in depth in the conclusion (talk about how you could make the experiment better, where the experiment went wrong, etc). Also, always include units to back up your numbers!!