The class structure has completely changed. This is the most up to date review you’ll read if you’re planning to take LS107. Obviously everyone knows it was an easy A in the past because it was online. Thus, all of the grade distributions and his rating seem stellar. However, now that it’s flipped, the class is phenomenally harder and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a downtrend in rating with Pham. Fall 2024, he had a policy where with test corrections you’d get half points back of whatever you missed. So say you got a 60/100, that would bump to an 80/100 after corrections. No wonder everyone got an A. However, now this policy has changed. You can only be awarded 5 points out of 100 on the midterm for test corrections via a quiz, and 10 points on the final worth 200 points total. Does it help? Yes, by 2.5% of your total grade after all other assignments are tsken into account. But does it help as much as receiving 1/2 points back on every question like in the past? Heck no. Thus, I wouldn’t be surprised if the grading distribution becomes a lot more scattered outside of the A range in future quarters. My friends and I are typically 4.0 ish students (3.9-4.0), yet were trauma bonded and humbled by how we went into this class thinking easy A and were not at all met with an easy A class. The average j midterm 1 (the easiest of all midterms) was an 87%, followed by midterm 2 73%, followed by the final a 71%. It’s not horrible, but be prepared for this class to be the most workload on your class schedule. I’d compare this class difficulty to Lannan for 153A, except no recycled exams. Eat sleep and breathe genetics. I got a 93% on the final but took endless nights of no sleep and losing myself mentally. So glad to be done..

This was a flipped class. As long you watched the lecture videos before class, you should be able to follow along easily. I found the exams super easy. They were all multiple choice, which might be a downside for some people since you can't show your work and earn partial credit, but you get a lot of time to finish. He let you earn back half the points you missed on exams by turning in an assignment with a few questions similar to the exam. He required attendance and used iclicker questions occasionally. It is also important to go to discussion because they go over a lot of questions that would be hard to figure out on your own (attendance wasn't mandatory though). In my opinion, the class is an easy A. The material was easy to understand and he taught it with great clarity.

I could not recommend a better Life Science elective than 107 with Dr. Pham. He is truly a gift to this Earth; you can tell he fully cares about the wellbeing of his students and has an honest mastery over the material. He never hesitates to answer as many questions as are had during lecture (even some of the not-so-bright questions). His discussion worksheets are challenging at times, but fully reflect the difficulty of exam questions (exam questions are sometimes easier than the discussion worksheets). The grade breakdown is relatively simple, with points allotted for four missed class sessions, two missed discussion sections, a few missed quizzes, etc. The midterms were fair and honestly quite fun (I seamlessly received near-perfect grades on both), and the final was fairly simple as well.

The only trick to this class is that it gets SIGNIFICANTLY harder at the end. The content up to the first midterm is almost all 7B, with some new content being introduced for the second midterm. The final adds in bacteriophage genetics, a concept entirely new to me, and one that was somewhat difficult to get down. After watching Dr. Pham's recorded lectures a couple of times, though, I managed okay for the final.

Overall, I strongly recommend taking this class with this professor! If anything, I believe you'll have a good time and take many things away from it!

I’m not gonna lie… this class freaked me out for half of the quarter. I felt totally lost and bombarded by material. The two first exams were rough, but the final was super easy which was a relief for a lot of people because it was worth the most points. He basically tells you what is going to be on the final. The hardest part about learning in this class is that he will give you practice problems, show you how to do them, and then give you another problem that is related but you still have to do it differently (and he doesn’t show you how to do it). I feel like the class is a lot of guessing and asking questions rather than actual teaching. You really really have to understand everything he shows you, the TAs show you and the practice tests too. I didn’t love this class, but I also didn’t hate it.

I don't know why people say this class is an easy A because you actually do need to put in the work. This class is flipped where he has you watch lecture videos before lecture. Weekly the class consisted of watching pre-class lecture videos (1hr-1 1/2 hours long), taking a pre-class lecture quiz, a weekly quiz that was based on discussion worksheets. Sometimes there were two lecture video topics a week so it'd be slightly overwhelming since assignments doubled for that week but it was doable. I felt like my discussion section wasn't that helpful but I heard there were a few good TAs. It starts off really easy but as the quarter goes on the topics start becoming harder. Lecture was mainly him doing clicker questions based off of what was talked about in the lecture video also attendance is mandatory. I will admit the midterms/final was hard but the good think is he offers EC after the exams 5pts minimum at least. Overall, he was really sweet, had tons of OHs, and drops some assignments.

Because the class is majority busy work, it's pretty easy to get an A if you're with the right people and get all your homework in on time. Dr Pham himself is a super nice guy but I can't say I found his lectures very engaging. The slides lacked lots of necessary information and many of the exam questions were just testing whether or not you could decipher tricky wording, not how well you understood the content. You will probably lose some points with sneaky wording and application-based questions that were never discussed in class. Even with all that though, it is pretty easy to make up points to secure at least a 93. Dr Pham wasn't the most engaging and was pretty hard to follow at times, but he is a really nice guy and is passionate about the material.

Dr. Pham is an excellent teacher! Yes, he has a bit of an accent, but I never found myself struggling to understand him (some of the other reviews on here seem a bit exaggerated). The clicker questions serve as really good prep for the AoLs, and Pham provided good explanations for answers that didn't seem the most intuitive.

The pods are really make or break for this class. I got rather lucky with my group members (we all showed up to lecture, collaborated, seemed passionate about the subject, and even hung out outside of class) so I found myself enjoying the course, but I have heard a handful of horror stories. Even with bad group members, though, the content is generally pretty understandable so you can still succeed on your own.

I never took AP Bio in high school and was still able to receive a good grade in this course, so you can too!!

The 7A class is uniform across all lectures, no matter the professor. So, in terms of the tests, everyones being tested on the same material. My problem with the class was it seemed like you needed a pretty food background in Biology to understand the quickly paced course.

The topics change super quick, and the slides are nowhere near as in depth as they should be, so you are stuck drawing your own conclusions and having to do more work to figure out what you need to learn. I think the majority of test problems actively reflect the lecture material, but there were multiple problems where the application of knowledge seemed a step above what we learned sometimes.

My best advice: READ CAREFULLY...
They will get you with sneaky words. Don't lose easy points.

PROS:
Fun class, GREAT TA made it so good shoutout to Veronika!
Extra credit is readily available
Easy homework load

The course is heavily standardized across the different lectures/professors so the workload and content is the same. Dr Pham himself is very nice and enthusiastic. I am pretty bad at understanding people with accents and he does have a kind of heavy one but I found it wasn't an issue as long as I was paying attention to him (so if you're like me regarding understanding accents, downside is that you can't zone out while still sort of listening)

Class: Was on track for an A and then got absolutely humbled by the third AOL. Dr. Pham was really nice and was always open to answering questions. Personally I did not like the slides for this class and feel like it was really hard to be engaged during it especially since he talked fast and I feel like there would be a lot of pictures and not a lot of explanation. Since all the 7A classes have the same content, you can watch the lectures from other professors on the website, which I heard people say was really beneficial. They also use iClicker, but this is pretty much just effort based.

Work: This entire class is point based, which is great (unless you did terrible on the final like me). Pre-class and reflections were super doable, I would just do it all in one day and pretty much graded on effort. Practice tests (PALs) could be confusing & graded on accuracy, but worth very little points overall. Discussion assignments were usually gone over by your TA, but are graded on accuracy too in Gradebook, so pay attention. Out of all the AOLs, the 2nd one was the easiest, then 1st, and the final was atrocious, but if you have a good pod (who you will work with after each class on a worksheet, during discussion, and on the group final) I'm sure you'll be fine especially since they're all online which takes the pressure off a little bit. DO ALL THE EXTRA CREDIT. They offer a lot, and that's a grade cushion you wanna take advantage of.