[Eva C]

PROTEINS PROTEINS PROTEINS!
That is all the entire class is about!

This class was very different from the ones i have taken before. The course breakdown was interesting. There were quizes every week and in return there was no exam. The course started off really interesting with Dr. Junop teaching us the importance of proteins, how it folds, what it can do, exparimental methods to isolate specific desired proteins. The quizes were tricky. Each quiz consists of 5 questions. You have to read very carefully to not be tricked. One word in each question makes a big difference to your answer. You ewre able to drop one quiz, which was nice too. You did 8 quizes and only count 7.

There were two assginments. This is where the course goes downhill...
These two assignments were interesting and different. It was fun, if you enjoy problem solving and researching on your own. However, they require alot of work. This is because the outline of what we had to do was vary ambiguous. One question would be worth 20 marks. However, we did not know what to write or how specific it had to be. Some people wrote 50 pages worth of stuff for each assisngment and included the details they wanted. While others only wrote 20ish pages, and couldn't thikn of any omre to write and did horrible because if it. The marking was also dependent on the T.A.. But generally, all four were hard. If you get these assginments. START EARLY and WRITE ALOT. Mark dropped significantly for everyone because of these two assignments. Even though Dr. Junop extended the deadlines... it was still horrible...

After Dr. Junop finishes teaching for a bit more than half of the class, you being working on your group project. It is on any topic you want as long as it is related to the following topics: 1) Protein Structure 2) Impact of Protein on Health/Society 3) Protein-Protein Interactions 4) Enzyme Reaction Mechanisms and Kinetics. The presentations were fine. You are in groups of 8-10 working on any topic you wanted. The presentations were only 10 minutes and only 2 group members presented. It was werid how we had to write individual reports on the material we presented instead of a group report. The T.A.s wanted us to have the same material, which showed that we "worked together". If someone had extra material you would get penalized cause you aren't "sharing" as a group. So you would have 8-10 reports on the SAME THING, just written in different styles. Werid. The marking once again, were not that generous, althought still alot better than the assignments.

Overall the protein material were interesting. However, because of the ambigous outlines and expectations, it caused too much frustration and stress that I did not enjoy it as much as I would have. Dr. Junop is nice and a good prof. However, your mark was basically dependent on the T.A. which you don't really get much time to talk to anyways.

COURSE BREAKDOWN

• Quizes - 35% (7 quizes x 5%)
• Assignment 1- 15%
• Assignment 2- 15%
• Inquiry Project- 35%
  • Presentation - 5%
  • Final Individual Report - 25%
  • Peer Evaluations- 5%

Did they ever change the assignments to become less ambiguous in the last few years?

i know this is not related but how is biochem 2L06 like?

Is anyone willing to share their past quizzes for this course? It would be very helpful :(

Prof: Dr. Yang
40% : 8 Quizzes (8Q per quiz, so 1% per question)
20% : 2 Assignments
40% : Inquiry project

Yang is a good lecturer. His lectures are definitely a lot more interesting than most profs who use textbooks by Wiley as these profs tend to just read off their powerpoints word for word, and the powerpoints are word for word from the textbook so it makes you wonder why you're paying so much to have someone read a book to you. The downside of Yang's lecturing is that he brings up so many concepts that he encourages you to look up but doesn't actually test you on any of it. His quizzes were questions that were straight from the textbook, so you didnt need to attend lecture. He also reused quiz questions that he used in the Fall semester preceding this course (Biochem 3G03) so you can always go into the 3G03 folder on LearnLink and save all the quizzes.

Assignments were kind of inquiry assignments. For example our first assignment involved him giving us a protein's amino acid sequence and we had to use online software to predict and explain the primary, secondary, tertiary structures and identify where it would be found in the human body. He said that the goal of these assignments is to not look for whether your answer is explicitly right or wrong, but how well you can explain and back up your ideas and research found.

Inquiry project was hell. 10 people in a group. He gave one word for your topic and you had to find a topic relating to that topic and proteins and develop something novel (like a thesis project). It was really difficult to come up with a topic that was suitable for our level but also a topic that the TA would approve of.

The course was really messy and there were no guidelines for anything other than what was written on the course outline. A lot of things were left very ambiguous and it wasn't because he was trying to be flexible. In his course outline he said that this is not a course of memorizing trivial information, but the quizzes were pretty much memorizing random information in my opinion. Definitely less memorizing than 2B03 but still quite a bit as some chapters had a lot of information and your quiz only had 8 questions.

If you're in a program other than biochem and have the option to choose between 2B+2BB/3G, choose 3G because that course covers all the same material and it just pure outright memorizing the textbook and your mark is based on 6 tests, no assignments and no inquiry project.