From what I remember:

Lab 1 - Ecology
The point of the lab is to assess the health of Cootes Paradise by examination of water pH and phosphate concentrations, as well as by measure of bioindicator species. Basically, you get to go down to Cootes as a class, and dig up some...

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how was the prof for this course?
i believe it will be J. Daniel this fall

good to hear Tas mark easier NOW

I took 2L03 term 1 last year, Jacobs was alright. His slides weren't the best and he kind of rambled on about things sometimes. The TAs were pretty nice, they tried to help you out but sometimes they marked a little hard depending on the assessment. Make sure you ask them beforehand about certain things, even spacing in figures or titles on graphs, because they might take marks off for that.

I think I learned a lot from this course and I actually enjoyed it, but it was definitely a greater time commitment than you think it is. Always be wary of labs going over time, that happened more than once. I don't think the course would have been that bad if there weren't as many assignments, the letters to nature and lab reports were already a lot of work. Especially around the middle, there was a letter to nature, lab report, and assignment due on the same day, and Jacobs' assignments were sometimes difficult to understand. That being said, it was a pretty good course, you get comfortable with lab skills, you get to work with frogs, nematodes etc. and I think it's definitely helpful if you're unsure about doing research/thesis.

I took this course in Fall 2012 with Dr. Daniel. There were about 40 students in this course and 20 per lab slot.

The labs were exactly as described in the first post of this thread, although the order changed slightly. Dr. Daniel was a patient lecturer who encouraged questions and had a focused scope of content material. The guest lecturers were generally engaging. Great instructional assistant (Sinah) who, along withe TAs, were very helpful during the lab and accessible through email. Our TAs were not easy markers outright but gave enough constructive criticism while encouraging improvement. The labs were pretty time-consuming both to perform and to write but it was worth the amount of breadth we were able to cover in terms of different fields within biology. It gives you something extra to point out when considering working with a guest lecturer (a McMaster prof) who you may want to approach for research opportunities. Some labs we performed were actually identical to those of third year labs, so it was enjoyable to have a sneak peek and try our hand at achieving the desired results. I learned a considerable amount in terms of writing papers, searching for peer-reviewed articles, formatting research articles, and honing on skills for writing succinct lab reports. Overall, a fun and fulfilling course - you'll definitely learn something. Not a bird, but not overly difficult. Just time-consuming. Did well.