Hello,

I'm debating b/w these two courses and I was wondering if anyone can shed some light on either one. The course reviews on the site are outdated and I was wondering if there were any recent changes to these courses, difficulty of midterms, exams, etc. Any insight would be appreciated !

Thank you for your time,

Originally Posted by beatsbydre

Hello,

I'm debating b/w these two courses and I was wondering if anyone can shed some light on either one. The course reviews on the site are outdated and I was wondering if there were any recent changes to these courses, difficulty of midterms, exams, etc. Any insight would be appreciated !

Thank you for your time,

Having taken both, I would say:
for 3FF3:
A dry and boring course, the exam was open laptop last year (you can even use google, but not facebook) and therefore it was extremely easy. VERY easy 12 but the material is not very interesting even though Dr. Stone is a relatively decent lectuer. There are many opportunities to do well and they drop your lowest tutorial and has alternative weighing. There is NO midterm. the tutorials are straight forward and relatively pain free.

3A03:
Dr. da Silva is a great prof and the course is very very interesting. The midterms are not challenging but fair. If you study hard for the midterm, it is easy to do well. there are 4 midterms, but the lowest one is dropped. There are no exams. The project or symposium is fun but the experience depends on your group members. I felt the tutorials are basically free marks and they are generally pretty dry and talks about careers and stuff. Overall, definitely 12able if you work hard, but more difficult than 3FF3 (because 3FF3's exam was open laptop, so basically you search up everything)

Hope it helps

Originally Posted by gggggg

Having taken both, I would say:
for 3FF3:
A dry and boring course, the exam was open laptop last year (you can even use google, but not facebook) and therefore it was extremely easy. VERY easy 12 but the material is not very interesting even though Dr. Stone is a relatively decent lectuer. There are many opportunities to do well and they drop your lowest tutorial and has alternative weighing. There is NO midterm. the tutorials are straight forward and relatively pain free.

3A03:
Dr. da Silva is a great prof and the course is very very interesting. The midterms are not challenging but fair. If you study hard for the midterm, it is easy to do well. there are 4 midterms, but the lowest one is dropped. There are no exams. The project or symposium is fun but the experience depends on your group members. I felt the tutorials are basically free marks and they are generally pretty dry and talks about careers and stuff. Overall, definitely 12able if you work hard, but more difficult than 3FF3 (because 3FF3's exam was open laptop, so basically you search up everything)

Hope it helps

even though the Bio 3FF3 exam was open book, doesn't that mean Dr. Stone makes the questions way harder? And was the exam only 21 questions? It seems kind of heavy for 40% of your mark based on ~20 questions. Were the questions actually easy to find answers on the internet, or did they require critical thinking?

Originally Posted by bradyr

even though the Bio 3FF3 exam was open book, doesn't that mean Dr. Stone makes the questions way harder? And was the exam only 21 questions? It seems kind of heavy for 40% of your mark based on ~20 questions. Were the questions actually easy to find answers on the internet, or did they require critical thinking?

I'll be honest with you, I did not even study for half of the exam. There are critical thinking questions that are based on calculations (those are very easy and VERY similar to the examples on his slides, which you have access to through the open LAPTOP exam, btw you can also bring your book + laptop). The hard questions IMO in evolution are the small detail questions, which can be easily searched up on laptop. I felt the questions are very easy WITH the laptop. However, if he gave the same questions without the laptop, I would do A lot worse and idk if he is going to allow an open laptop exam this year.

any assignments or essays? if so, how are they marked?

3A03 had two essays, each were 500 words. I found it was tricky to answer all of the questions within the word count but if you put effort in, they were marked fairly. Can't comment on the other course because I haven't taken it

Originally Posted by shelbs

3A03 had two essays, each were 500 words. I found it was tricky to answer all of the questions within the word count but if you put effort in, they were marked fairly. Can't comment on the other course because I haven't taken it

sorry, there were also essays. It was hard to fit them into 500 words, but some TAs did not care about the word count and they were generous (at least most of them) with the grades.

I meant for Bio 3FF3, are there essays/assignments. If so, how many and are they marked?