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5th Year 2016 W Term 2 Review

5 th Year 2016 W Term 2 Review BIOL361  -  Physiology of Sensory, Nervous and Muscular Systems   class average = 73 I would say that this course provides good foundation in physiology - the content itself is not too difficult and seemed like a slight extension to BIOL 260. You really learn about those systems in the course title for the whole term starting from scratch and can be boring at times because you think you already know those concepts (ex. took half of the term learning about axons and action potentials), but it does get more interesting as you progress through the term. In terms of grading schemes it is composed of clicker questions + prereading quiz (10%), midterm exam (30%), and final exam (60%) - I heard this could change up to your preferences/performances as you can choose not to write the midterm exam and make the final exam worth 90%, or do better on the final exam than midterm exam, making the final exam worth 90%. I took this class with Dr. Lacombe, and t
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4th Year 2015 S Review

BIOL341 - Introductory Molecular Biology Laboratory class average = 83 This course was very well organized and content-wise not very difficult if you are familiar with molecular genetics. The syllabus is not really different in the summer (Bioinformatics presentation + a final report on recombinant plasmid), but the fact that you can get over it within 6 weeks without any other course load should convince you enough to take this course during the summer. The class runs three times a week (T,W,Th), and each session about 4 hours long - this means for Wednesday and Thursday classes, you get less than 24 hours to do winter session's 1 week equivalent of lab work. I noticed that the first PCR primer assignment tends to scare people away, but the assignments later on are pretty much manageable within few hours. The series of lectures and experiments pretty much prepares you for the report that is due at the end of the term  (+occasional lectures on bioinformatics) - in fact, the goo
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4th year Term 2 Review

BIOL 458 - Developmental Neurobiology  class average = 79 This course deals with the brain development from the neuralation all the way up to neural degeneration & aging. Simply put, this course has both developmental biology and neuroscience aspects. Many topics are covered through out the term - the topics include, neurotrauma, behavioral development, congenital disorders, neural refinement, axon outgrowth, differentiation, migration and neural tube formation etc. As you can expect from the list, many topics are covered and a lot of the materials are directly from the cutting edge papers making the course material dense with knowledge. Too much of the information are thrown at you and at some point you start worrying how you would study for all this information. However, Dr. Steeves will tell you what will be on the exam during his review session - everything that he mentions that day will be on the exam, no more, no less. So you just have to attend lectures, enjoy what he say
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4th Year Term 1 Review

BIOL 301 - Biomathematics  class average = 81 The course covers mathematical models used in biological systems - you learn about Single variable models, multi-variable models (2x2 Matrix) and a little bit of probability models to account for stochasticity. I took it because I wanted to learn more math than 1st year calculus (and also has high class average!). At first I was intimidated because it had weekly assignments from pre-reading(usually one chapter a week) + programming (for Mathematica) + many students with much more MATH background than MATH 102/103. I was actually considering dropping the course, but it turned out that the professor covers much of the topic in class anyways and the assignments aren't too difficult either(you can always get help form the TA). Weekly labs are just for participation marks too. Moreover, you don't need much background in mathematics to do well in this course; in fact, I did pretty well even though I didn't remember much calculus fr
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EOSC 118 Final Exam

E-mail: Anonymous asked how to prepare for the EOSC 118 Final exam. I'll begin with how I prepared for the EOSC 118 final exam. Frankly speaking, I didn't prepare much, all I did was to read over the notes that I had taken over the term, and went over all the quiz questions. To tell you the truth, this wasn't enough.  (I couldn't give much time as I had BIOL 200 exam on the same day!) The exam was 100 MC questions - I answered 60 questions with confidence and guessed the rest of the 40 questions.  I think they scaled the final exam -  because I ended up with 90.  I guess  this is why Science students say EOSC 118 is a booster because in other words, if I could answer more questions, then my mark would have been way higher. (My friend actually got 100 so there you go)  I don't really remember what was on the exam, but what I can  advise you to do is to try to understand the diagrams and science behind the lectures.  There are only few lectures (I think) that
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3rd Year Summer Review

BIOL 336 - Fundamentals of Evolutionary Biology  class average = 75 The course material doesn't deviate much from what you learned in BIOL 121. Having studied Genetics, I was hoping to gain more knowledge on population genetics but contrary to my expectations, this course was barely quantitative. There are some topics that I found interesting, but like BIOL 121, the concepts are still broad and doesn't really have defined answers . However, I would recommend taking this course in the summer because they don't make you write what's called the "Short Opinion Papers" - which they make you do in the winter sessions(this means less work!). Textbook is required as you have pre reading quizzes. Midterm and final wasn't easy as they mark with scrutiny and look for key words(like Ecology Exams), but they were doable and the marks you get from tutorials + clickers + prereading quizzes compensate for the loss. Work load was manageable - I was working part-time,
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3rd Year Term 2 Review

BIOL 260 - Fundamentals of Physiology  class average = 74 It was a good course. All I had to do were attend the lectures, understand all the concepts and the questions proposed in class. The instructors have passion in teaching and were very effective in demonstrating the course material. This course has 2 midterms and a final exam, but if you do better on the later exams, then they will omit the exams that you did poorly on - so you always have a chance to do better. I learned much about the introductory level understanding of ion transport mechanism and the action potential. The only bad thing about this course is that all the questions are written - my wrist would hurt after the first few questions :( BIOL 335 - Molecular Genetics   class average = 69 This course has two parts. The first half you learn about techniques and the later half you learn about developmental biology. The course is really interesting but it is really different from what you would expect from BIOL 234 -
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