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Biology 2B03: Same as first year Cell bio with the modules but you now have one lecture a week and that is the applied lecture. There are no labs, only tutorials. However tutorials are not every week, in total there were about 5-6 if I remember correctly, but some of them are not mandatory as the TA is just explaining the assignment but the assignments are pretty straightfoward. As with Bio 1A03, this course is all memorizing. You have 2 midterms and an exam and none of the assessments are cumulative so it's a bit less stressful. Profs I had were DaSilva and Dej.
MolBiol/Biology 2C03: In my opinion it was a very boring introduction to genetics. You learn about sickle cell anemia, colour dilution of cat coats, fruitfly breeding and eye colour, gene mapping and certain mechanisms. There are quizzes in tutorials every week. The bad thing about being in MolBiol is that there are only 2 tutorial sections and if you're forced into the 8:30am timeslot you'll hate your life. Honestly, the MolBiol and the Biology tutorials don't teach different content. In the Molbiol tutorials, we were able to use our own saliva to determine our DNA sequence for certain traits such as eye colour, smell sensitivity, earwax wet/dryness. It was pretty useless though because they ended up sending us a summary of all our mutations pertaining to those traits but it was just a DNA sequence and I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do with that because there weren't any follow up assignments. You needed to know your content really well in this course as lecture and tutorial content is testable. Some questions are nitpicky and ask what abbreviations stand for, or to state Mendel's law of independent assortment, while other questions may be application or calculation questions. It was a difficult course for me because the lectures were at 8:30 when I took it and the content was not actually THAT interesting. Midterm and Exam are both worth 40% and are non cumulative so you have no room to fuck up. Profs I had were Dej and Gupta.
Biology 2EE3: Don't know who's teaching it next year but this is one of the courses where you have a prof who uses a textbook by Wiley. We had Schellhorn this year and he is horrible. He reads word for word off the slides, which are word for word from the textbook and then would go on tangents about his life, his research and his tennis partner Dr. Gupta. Because he's reading off the slides, he covers a lot of material in one lecture. This course is PURE memorizing. You're expected to know the fine details such as the names of certain species all the way to the big picture of things. Lecture content had potential to be more interesting but the prof was horrible. The labs were very interesting as you get to grow cultures on the plates, including various bactieras, soil samples, and viruses. Each lab had a post-lab assignment to be completed, with one lab having a full lab report to be completed. Labs can be time consuming as you are not only expected to finish the lab and the lab assignment, but also keep a good lab notebook and come back after your lab to check on your growths. So in my case, since I had a Friday lab, I had to come back on Saturday or Monday to check on the growths and collect data in order to complete my assignments/lab report.
Biochem 2B03: Pure memorizing. Relearning DNA replication, translation and transcription but now the prof adds in a shit ton of nit picky details that are just stupid in my opinion and actually being tested on them. The profs this year were Singh and Hope and tbh they were not that good. Hope was better than Singh but she still was not that good. You don't really need to go to lectures. The material is pretty straightforward and testable material is straight from the slides in a varying amount of detail (sometimes word for word, i.e. anything that shows up on the slide is testable). Exam was brutal. The multiple choice section was focused on things that were not tested on the two tests that we had in class and these questions ended up testing the most trivial things ever, almost as if hey had run out of content to test on, but that's impossible. I'd assume that for a final exam, the prof would end up testing you on the big picture, the main processes, the things they want you to take away from the course. NOPE. It was little factoids here and there that had one-liners on their powerpoints. Then the short answer part was completely based on the journal article they discussed in class so if you didn't study/pay attention to those you were completely fucked. There was also an assignment that you had to do in groups where you read a journal article and answer a set of questions. It was quite difficult.
Biochem 2BB3: Less memorizing but still quite a bit. I just posted a review of this course so you can check it out over in the course review section.
Organic Chem I & II: profs are horrible. don't go to class, theyre just reading the textbook to you. Read the textbook on your own and do all the practice problems and tutorial assignments. The profs read the textbook to you in lecture too quickly so you have no time to absorb it. The key in this course is practice. However there is a lot of memorization as you're expected to know all the reactions, conditions and mechanisms of pretty much everything.
All in all, you're going to be memorizing a shit ton and learning stuff that is not interesting at all. Majority of the lab work in MolBiol doesn't begin till 3rd year so you have to evaluate whether you think it is worth waiting that long; doing a whole year of trivial memorization just to get a few courses of lab work. I feel like MBG requires you to become a robot.
Last edited by Imperious : 04-29-2016 at 11:53 AM.
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