I took this course in summer with Dr. Sonnenburg. So it's marking scheme may be a little different than in the school year, but it's content will be generally the same.
Teacher:
- Dr. Sonnenburg is an awesome prof, she is always straight to the point, has a sense of humor and doesn't BS you with useless info. Also her exam review is freaking godlike.
Textbook:
- NONE!
However, there are a few articles every week, but they are maybe 500 words.
Marking Scheme:
- Best 5 of 6 quizzes - 10% each
- Exam - 50%
-I personally love courses like these. The quizzes are based on the weeks content, and two or three articles. They are definitely not too hard if you have all of your content within arms reach to double check your answers, and have the articles read ahead of time. You have one hour to complete 20 questions, so it is a lot of time, but if you have no idea what is in the articles you will be ctrl + f a lot of content to find it in your article/content. Spending 30 min ahead of the quiz reading the content and quizzes once over always resulted in getting a 90+.
-The exam is fair, if anything easy . . . BUT it is very long. It has 50% short answer (matching, terms) and multiple choice. There are two short answer based on movies with 5 marks each, and a long answer (cannot be in point form, must be sentences) worth 15 marks. If you studied her exam review and actually knew everything she mentioned you will be set.
Content:
-Start with the earliest explorers, and continues into modern space exploration.
-LAUNDRY LIST: Starts with First North Americans, Fossil's and Dinosaurs, Oldest rocks/volcanoes, Maps and mapping N.A., Geoscience expeditions (Lyell, Darwin(!), and Wallace), Underwater exploration/archaeology, finishing with space exploration.
- I found it all interesting... except maps... and it makes it better that after almost every class there was a movie. The movies were mostly modern, and a bunch of them had pretty decent stories...
-She did warn us at the beginning that it is more of a Social Science course, because you are looking at the explorations, and not much science involved. AS a science student I was new to short and long answer exams, probably never want to do it again.
In short... awesome and interesting course, if you do even a moderate amount of studying you will get a decent mark, but definitely don't treat it like a bird course... it is quite a bit of memorization (more social science geared) and if you mess up on more than one quiz, or even the exam you mark will drop fast.
