1st Year Term 1 2011 W Review

These are the courses that I have taken in term 1 when I was just starting UBC

BIOL 121:

Genetics, Evolution and Ecology

This is an introductory course on Ecology, Genetics and Evolution. I really liked the Genetics portion of the course and that was pretty much it. Contents taught in Ecology and Evolution was just too plain and were very picky on the marks (exams were all written). This course really can be different based on which prof you get, so I highly recommend that you do some searchings beforehand. This is also the course that I spent the most time on, but it turns out that I didn't have to. It assigns you a lot of pre-readings but only 20% of the materials were examinable. All the readings took me whole Saturday and I regret doing all the readings when I was done with the course; in fact, you can probably do decent on this course just by studying the materials covered during the lectures.

 CHEM 121:

Structural Chemistry, with Application to Chemistry of the Elements

I don't really have any bad memories with this course. This course is awesome in the aspect that you are ONLY responsible for the materials covered in the custom textbook. I did see some students not doing well on their midterms, but I also saw people rescuing their marks at the end. The lab can be tedious but I think this course prepares you well for the 2nd year Chemistry courses.

 CHIN 101:

Basic Chinese I: Part 1 (Non-Heritage)

I took this as an elective. I hated how I had to go Mon/Tues/Thurs and Friday. This course demands some time commitment as it is heavy with skits, chapter quizzes, chapter tests, assignments, oral exams etc. However, if you keep up with the material, this course is dead easy. The only thing I didn't like is that this course scales your mark at the end; I think it is their policy just giving 1 A+ (or none if there are many students with the highest mark) per section. If you are looking for a GPA booster (90+), then I really recommend that you take GERM 100
  
ENGL 112:

Strategies for University Writing

I hated this course so much. I really think that all the courses were worth taking it to some extent but not this one. I literally learned nothing in this class. I think it's because of the professor. She (I think her name was Dreher) was a wonderful human being but I don't think she was an effective instructor. I handed in my research paper without learning anything and she gave me C- on the report. I was penalized in not having the correct citations, but I didn't even learn what MLA style was... I really blame the prof for the lowest mark I have ever gotten in UBC. What I would recommend though, take this course in conjunction with BIOL 140; this way, you will learn enough about the citation (though they have different style) when you are writing your paper.

 MATH 102:

Differential Calculus with Applications to Life Sciences

This course was easy because I had taken AP Calculus in high school. If you keep up with the assignments that they give you, you will do fine in this course. I didn't really like the lab part though, but it was a good way to learn data handling and TAs are there to help you anyways. This course has an online text book and if you are stuck on one concept, you can always refer to it and get help.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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 calc...
Read more

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 lectu...
Read more

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...
Read more