This course is divided into three parts. The first two profs tried to incorporate a sort of model to aid the curriculum.

Dr. Jacobs - Cell Bio
- had a virus model. Seemed irrelevant until after the unit which is kind of unfortunate because understanding was crammed to the end....

Click here to read the entire review

This doesn't seem like an interesting bio course, shouldn't have taken it haha

Sadly it's required though .. and you'll need it to take upper-year bio courses

Its really not as bad as it sounds, I swear!

I mean, yeah Jacobs was not the greatest teacher, and had really poor notes. But he did have online lectures on the virus and on all the major groups of Macromolecules (Proteins, Nucleic Acids, Lipids and Carbohydrates) which were all really helpful. The virus is actually pretty interesting, and serves as a really good model for a lot of cell processes.

Kajiura was as awesome as always though. Great notes, great lectures, relatively easy material. It didn't have as much of the interest factor for me, but a lot of it was still pretty cool.

And for me, Wilson was the best part. A lot of people didn't like her, but she did post her full notes online in advance, and her material was by far the most interesting. She also gave review questions before the exam that were VERY representative of the difficulty of the exam, which was nice. (In fact, a few of those questions made it onto the exam verbatim- so study that part well!).

Also the lab coordinator Alistair was a great guy, who was always willing to help. Also your TAs are all awesome.

The only part I didn't like (aside from the Jacobs actual lectures) was the labs- they were all boring and didn't help us with any of the concepts. Of course, I dislike labs in general, so maybe that's a bit biased >.<

Jacobs was a boring lecturer but I found his course material very interesting.

Ohh Awesomee! Thanks a lot Andrew! Stupid question(perhaps) But when I looked at the master timetable .. for 1A03.. First semester there's sections by Kajiura/Boreham. BUt second semester for the course it's Kajiura/Wilson.. Will all 3 professors still teach both terms.. Or will the 3 profs "rule" change to just 2 this time ?

Also, do you guys know where I can find the course outlines..for what topics are covered in the course and such... some are on the department page.. others aren't :S

They might have changed the number of professors as well as which professors are teaching it. Or they might only list 2 of the profs. I can't recall exactly, but I think ours might have only said Kajiura. (Someone who payed more attention to their course selection could confirm/deny this?)

As far as a course outline, I'll check to see if WebCT still has stuff posted.

No, they took all that stuff down. As a rough outline though:

-Macromolecules
-Cell Processes
-Cell Division
-Genetics
-DNA replication (translation and transcription)
-Functional Genetics (operons and such)
-PCR, sequencing, etc

Thanks Andrew! If my memory serves me well, I think almost all of these topics were covered in grade 11 and 12 biology, so hopefully it's more detailed in a non-complicated way next year . Hmm, excluding Fuctional genetics probably.. Thanks a lot!
It would be really convenient if anyone can confirm the whole professor thing on SOLAR.

I checked the Master timetable and it only lists labs, but are there tutorials in this course as well?

Originally Posted by nciggle

I checked the Master timetable and it only lists labs, but are there tutorials in this course as well?

there were "optional" tutorials last year... quotation marks used because they were worth marks.. maybe they will assign them later on...

Anyways, a funny thing happened last year. Some people I know thought that since chem/bio labs are EOW, they'd have it on the same day and it would work out (Chem this Thursday at 8:30, Bio next Thursday at 8:30). However Chem takes a break off of labs the week before reading week and bio doesn't so the labs would coincide after the break... Lori Goff is useless about this and told my lab partner to choose to fail the lab component of biology or chem. Jeff Landry settled it with chem so it worked out but omg... what a suggestion...

OMG! That's so mean!? How can you make someone choose to fail the lab component just for one lab :(?!

Originally Posted by ~*Sara*~

OMG! That's so mean!? How can you make someone choose to fail the lab component just for one lab :(?!

That's a lot of % lost. I think each lab is worth 5%? Which means that they would have lost 10% of their mark because there were 2 after reading week.

It wouldn't be for one lab, it would be for like half of them. Still, I'm surprised Lori Goff wouldn't do anything about it. At the very least she should have directed them to Alistair, since I think that would fall under his scope (he's like the Jeff Landry of Bio 1A03!)

I dunno, she always seemed really nice when I went to see her.

She seems nice to me too, but maybe she couldn't do anything about it? I dunno Jeff Landry from chem fixed it up though.. he seems kind of scary when he warns people about copying other peoples' lab note books in lecture "WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL FAIL YOU!" but he was really nice about it and fixed it up for them.