I'm looking for an elective, and since I need to take a biology course, I thought I'd take BIO 1M03. How easy/hard is it to obtain a 12? What is the workload like? Is this a good elective? BTW I have read the course reviews, just want to know whether taking it as an elective is a good idea!

Thanks in advance!

Not really. Depends on prof. If you have Evans, from what I have heard, MAKE SURE YOU STAY FAR FAR AWAY FROM THAT PROF.

Originally Posted by AnimeGamer31

Not really. Depends on prof. If you have Evans, from what I have heard, MAKE SURE YOU STAY FAR FAR AWAY FROM THAT PROF.

Lol. I've heard this about pretty much every prof who has taught this course in the past five years.
Maybe it's just the course that sucks

A course you can get a 12 in is a course you wil be interested in. If your not a really big fan of evolution it might get a little boring, actually extremely boring if your studying how humans evolved. 1AO3 I personally found to be more work but a lot more interesting.

Originally Posted by airvcarmelo

A course you can get a 12 in is a course you will be interested in. If your not a really big fan of evolution it might get a little boring, actually extremely boring if your studying how humans evolved. 1AO3 I personally found to be more work but a lot more interesting.

That is the course. Half human evolution and half ecology. Very boring. 1A03 is more interesting. See if you can get 1A03 with Dr. Kajiura, she is a great prof.

Atrix, did you take Grade 12 University Bio in high school? If not, you will need to take 1P03.

Originally Posted by Atrix

I'm looking for an elective, and since I need to take a biology course, I thought I'd take BIO 1M03. How easy/hard is it to obtain a 12? What is the workload like? Is this a good elective? BTW I have read the course reviews, just want to know whether taking it as an elective is a good idea!

Thanks in advance!

You need to take a bio course :/

I'd suggest Bio 1P03 if you're looking for an easy mark, it's just a review of grade 12 bio. But, if you have taken Bio in grade 12, you can't take that, then you have to decide between Bio 1A03 and Bio 1M03, which are not good choices. As a science student, I prefer Bio 1A03, but look at how you did in Grade 12 Bio (if you took it). If you liked grade 12 bio and did well in it, then Bio 1A03 is the one you should definitely pick. It's basically 90% review of grade 12 bio, and the workload is kinda high with the labs which are AWFUL, but other than that the course content is good.

If your biology background is not that strong, then 1M03 might be the only one to pick only because the content is really simple, but it's so boring. And there's a lot of content to know. There's some anthropology in this course like looking at how humans evolved.

But, if I had a choice I wouldn't pick Bio 1M03 as an elective. I know someone that did, and regretted so bad. Studying for midterms and exams is a pain, especially for this course, and you have a huge project to complete. It's just not that easy to get a 12 in, unless you spend a lot of time in it.

Thanks everyone for the help so far!

Originally Posted by Alomar12

Atrix, did you take Grade 12 University Bio in high school? If not, you will need to take 1P03.

Unfortunately I have taken Grade 12 Bio. And I can't take BIO 1A03 either :(. BIO 1M03 next semester (with Evans/Quinn) is pretty much my only option. If it matters I did like evolution in HS, but what I'm most concerned about is the ability to 12 this course. Is marking of the PBL project or the SA qs on the midterms subjective?

My other option is to take it in the summer w/Kajiura. I know she's an excellent prof but my experience with summer courses is that because they're compressed, they tend to be much harder, at least for me.

Originally Posted by Atrix

Thanks everyone for the help so far!

Unfortunately I have taken Grade 12 Bio. And I can't take BIO 1A03 either :(. BIO 1M03 next semester (with Evans/Quinn) is pretty much my only option. If it matters I did like evolution in HS, but what I'm most concerned about is the ability to 12 this course. Is marking of the PBL project or the SA qs on the midterms subjective?

My other option is to take it in the summer w/Kajiura. I know she's an excellent prof but my experience with summer courses is that because they're compressed, they tend to be much harder, at least for me.

If Kajiura is teaching it, I'd definitely take it with her. She is an excellent prof, and even though it's compressed, it might be kinda good. Bio 1M03 can really burn you out, the content is just too dry. And I do think that Kajiura would make it easier to 12 this course, this was the only course I didn't 12 in my first semester.

it will be easy in summer, but is is still pretty easy with evans. quinn is easy since ecology is easy stuff. i found the course to be interesting since evolution is something we should all be familiar with.

Originally Posted by Atrix

Thanks everyone for the help so far!

Unfortunately I have taken Grade 12 Bio. And I can't take BIO 1A03 either :(. BIO 1M03 next semester (with Evans/Quinn) is pretty much my only option. If it matters I did like evolution in HS, but what I'm most concerned about is the ability to 12 this course. Is marking of the PBL project or the SA qs on the midterms subjective?

My other option is to take it in the summer w/Kajiura. I know she's an excellent prof but my experience with summer courses is that because they're compressed, they tend to be much harder, at least for me.

I couldn't stand Kajiura. Her teaching a course would be enough for me to not take it, easily. She taught 1/3 of 1M03 and 1/3 of 1A03 when I took those courses...and yeah. Never ever again.

Originally Posted by starfish

I couldn't stand Kajiura. Her teaching a course would be enough for me to not take it, easily. She taught 1/3 of 1M03 and 1/3 of 1A03 when I took those courses...and yeah. Never ever again.

Really? Why?

People think she's super nice but it's all an act, super fake. Every time I've spoken to her in person or through email she's been extremely rude. She's very condescending and babies students and acts like they know nothing about anything, and wastes a lot of lecture time (sometimes as much as 20min of a 50min lecture) with irrelevant stories about when she was an undergrad. I really don't care that she had a wobbly desk during one of her exams...I'm paying a lot of money to learn the course material, and instead she's wasting my time. And now I've heard that she's bribing students with reference letters to join whatever group she has going...absolutely ridiculous.

On top of that, her marking schemes for tests were very unfair. I remember for one of the Bio 1A03 tests, talking to the head TA when I went to go pick up my test, she said she had written it beforehand and not done very well, despite knowing the material...the answers she had put were correct but because she had worded them differently from how they were in the notes, she didn't get any marks for them. She tried to convince Kajiura that the marking was unfair, but Kajiura refused to change the way it was marked, so everybody did really poorly except for the people who memorized her notes verbatim.

She also allocated a large portion of marks on this one concept...and in this case, her notes directly contradicted the textbook and people asked her about it but she never clarified, and the day she taught it in class, the audio and projector in MDCL 1305 weren't working. So she got a small projector, had the entire class of 600 people move to one half of the lecture hall, so a lot of people were just standing way at the back or sitting on the floor, and then proceeded to lecture without a microphone so the vast majority of the class couldn't hear or see anything. That would have only been a minor annoyance if her notes didn't contradict every other source we could find...and then after all of that to be tested so heavily on those 30mins of lecture, where we had to write what was in her notes and not what the rest of the scientific community has agreed on.

So yeah...I strongly dislike her as a person and as a professor.

I thought the PBL project was the hardest part of the course. You need to devote a lot of time to the project and make sure you have good group members. If you can do well in the PBL project, and study adequately for the tests, you should be fine.

That being said, the difficulty of the tests depends on the profs. I took Bio 1M03 with Quinn and Stone and while a 12 may have been hard because of the project, an 11 probably wasn't. Quinn was good but Stone was very quiet and people talked all throughout his lectures. Because Stone expects you to know details for the tests and some things in class were hard to catch, his tests/part of the exam was tougher. We also had to read all of HHE. I did well when Kajiura taught 1A03 even though I didn't really like her, so you need to decide whether you prefer Kajiura or different profs.

The material isn't that bad. It was kind of boring but a lot of it was high school review for me, and it was easy to understand.

you can get a 12 honestly its not that bad. I agree the content is not most interesting but its easy to understand and once you do the tests are not that bad. The PBL project is pretty easy if you have a nice T.A.