[nerual]

I took this course in Sept 2009. It's a typical inquiry course, but based around chemical biology. Our first project was to take a part of an article and answer some questions about it in a group, then present it to the class. Between all of the groups, we covered the whole article. This was the easiest, and also the most boring project. The second project was also in groups, and it involved researching the medical claims surrounding a natural product, making a scientific poster and each person had to present it to a prof or peer mentor individually. The third project was the most interesting--each group gets a general topic in chemical biology, and then each INDIVIDUAL gets to pick a specific question that they want to research, and then write a report and do a 10-min presentation on it. All projects involve both a written component and a presentation, and you're marked by one of the four peer mentors and at least one of the two profs. There is also a question component at the end of the presentation, where profs/peer mentors/classmates get to ask you questions...the questions won't stop until you get asked something you don't know.

The profs were Nancy McKenzie and Paul Berti, and the peer mentors are people from 4th year chembio. Each group for every project is assigned a peer mentor, and the peer mentors occasionally teach concepts to the class.

The marking scheme was:
Random exercises: 6%
Project #1: 16%
Project #2: 28%
Project #3: 50%

They changed this course to one three hour lecture instead of three one hour lectures. Was a rather good course however the workload does take a good chunk of your time to complete.