[Anaam]

This course was taught by Dr. Rama Singh in Fall of 2010. It consisted of:
Presentation 1: 10%
Presentation 2: 20%
2 Critiques on other people's presentation topics: 20%
1 Midterm: 20%
1 Research paper: 30%

You picked from a bunch of topics, including; Kinship and altruism, brain behavior and violence, brain behaviour and intelligence, Mate selection etc.
The first presentation was a presentation of 2 primary journal article relating to your topic, and critiquing the methods and the research conclusions etc.
Second presentation was more broad and presented the topic more fully.

This is a seminar type course, so basically the students researched the topics and presented them, while the professor and the TA watched, listened and graded.

Book: required reading was a book called Not in Our Genes. It's a very old book that isn't even in circulation anymore. This book is a good read in general, because it critiques sciences and all that we have so far learned to be a scientific canon. So it's a good eye opener. And it's also good to read in order to do all the critiques of the researches presented. The professor said that the midterm will be on the book. However, it was NOT on the book AT ALL! It was completely based on his lectures. Things like definitions, rote memory type things. So make sure, you look over his lectures and not the book.

Fairly decent course. I would say it's easy. The workload for this course, because of the presentations, ends up being a little bit more. But I would say, compared to other bio courses, it's probably less intensive since it is group based. So if you divide the work well, you can do well.

[Scuderia]

so no final exam?

[meddling]

Anyone here who can provide more recent review? Thanks a lot!

[Tharshni.V]

Anyone have any reviews for Bio 4E03 (Population Genetics)? Which would you recommend in terms of workload and difficulty, 4EE3 or 4E03?

[ALL IS WELL]

This course was taught by Dr.Rama Singh in 2017.
1 Midterm 20%
2 presentations 10% each
participation mark 10%
Final paper 50%

The course structure was similar from before. Students were asked to pick a topic from the list provided from the prof and prepare 2 presentations and the final paper (group work).
The course content was very interesting and eye opening. However, there was no rubric for any of the presentations and the final paper. The students only had a generic guideline without the break down of marks but since the topics given were so diverse ranging from politics, social sciences to biology, it was not useful.
The TA and the prof were asking for very different things as well, leading to a huge discrepancy in what the students were asked to do by the prof and the marks given out by the TA. Not to mention that the students never got to see the marking sheet and the TAs notes for the second presentation and the final paper that supports and justify the marks given to the students.
I also think the TA this year (new) did not have adeuquent knowledge about these topics to provide proper feedback.
The workload of this course was not high and what I wrote might be subjective but I would advice you to think twice before taking this course. It was unfortunate that such an interesting course turned out to be so frustrating, not because of the content, but because of its disorganization.