Four Group Discussions 30% (7.5% each)
Field Trip Assignment 10%
Midterm 25%
Exam 35%
I thought this course was going to be fun and interesting but it turned out to be kinda boring and tedious.
The notes from the textbook chapters were straightforward, but the prof’s lectures on her research on Cootes Paradise and the Guest Lectures were more challenging to understand/study.
Don’t buy the textbook. Out of all the textbooks I ever had to buy, I used this one this one the least.
The tutorials were kinda hard because you had to co-ordinate with a big group of 7-8 people. But the tutorials were interesting and I felt I learned more from tutorials than lectures. Another good thing was that 5% of the 7.5% for the tutorial was dependent on your group members. So for not even trying, you could get 67% if your group members give you 100%, which most of them do cus no one wants to be mean.
The midterm was okay but what I didn’t like is that the questions were irrelevant and a lot of them did NOT test concepts. It's not because they tested random details; they would just ask random questions about ecology. Like I couldn’t figure out what the questions had to do with the material we learned...Maybe that was just me. One awesome thing was that Chow-Fraser gives you a practice midterm and she reuses a lot of questions from it for the real midterm. I would recommend memorizing the answers to every question on the practice midterm. She even reused some on the exam!
Topics Covered
Ecological Energetics, Nutrient Cycling, Population Ecology, Life Histories, Physiological Ecology, Behavioural Ecology, Biomes, Community Ecology, Disturbances, Successions, Conservation Ecology, Resource Ecology
Overall, I would recommend not taking this course, because the tutorials took way too much time to prepare and they sucked time away from other things, like say if you had an orgo midterm the next day. I think there are better/more interesting electives out there.
Last edited by BlueWave : 12-24-2010 at 11:37 PM.
karna
says thanks to BlueWave for this post.
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