Cell Biology is mostly a mandatory course for a lot of students in Biology and Biochemistry. It really depends on what type of a person you are in your learning style and the way you like to take tests. Some say its boring while others think it is easy and interesting. For me, I'm the interested...

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Originally Posted by Fight0

With Dej, all I did was study her notes. The textbook was pretty dense so I didn't bother reading it.

Oh, except for when Papaconstineau was teaching. I needed the text for her stuff, because her notes were pretty barren.

Nooooooooooooo, papaconstineau is co-teaching the course? :(

Cameron was equally bad :|

So it's really co-taught? Because in the MTT there is only 1 professor listed.

Originally Posted by jhan523

Nooooooooooooo, papaconstineau is co-teaching the course? :(

Yeah man, she taught for about two weeks. I attended one of her lectures and never came back Her teaching style was just brutal, but she had easy questions on the exam.

Originally Posted by Fight0

Yeah man, she taught for about two weeks. I attended one of her lectures and never came back Her teaching style was just brutal, but she had easy questions on the exam.

Can't say the same thing for Bio 1M03. I attended a couple of her lectures but I kept on falling asleep so I left. Her questions were ridiculous since it dealt with human evolution.

But it's nice to hear that her questions are easy for this course

I think people overhyped how bad Papaconstinea's teaching style was. She was certainly not an interesting lecturer, but I found her notes to be great. And her lecturing got a lot better for the parts on behaviour.

Originally Posted by A.Marlowe

I think people overhyped how bad Papaconstinea's teaching style was. She was certainly not an interesting lecturer, but I found her notes to be great. And her lecturing got a lot better for the parts on behaviour.

Her notes were copied from the textbook...

Originally Posted by jhan523

Her notes were copied from the textbook...

Which was excellent because you only needed to rely on the textbook OR her lectures. So you could save money by not buying the book, or save time by not going to class.

Pretty much if all the info we are going to be tested on is from the notes posted I'm a happy camper.

Originally Posted by A.Marlowe

Which was excellent because you only needed to rely on the textbook OR her lectures. So you could save money by not buying the book, or save time by not going to class.

Pretty much if all the info we are going to be tested on is from the notes posted I'm a happy camper.

But it you don't understand the book then you are basically screwed for that entire section.

I loved this course ... it was pretty easy. I loved the professor. Dr. Dej is pretty much the best prof i've had uptill now. Shez really helpful, understanding and an excellent teacher.

Also the labs were not too bad, just a bit confusing when read.

The tests werent too bad, the midterm was harder than the exam. Im pretty sure everyone aced the exam =)

Good luck to everyone whoz takin it in the future.

- Abhijeet

Originally Posted by jhan523

But it you don't understand the book then you are basically screwed for that entire section.

Well, then you might have to go to class once just to ask questions. Human Evolution wasn't exactly complex though, it was just memorization.

Originally Posted by A.Marlowe

Well, then you might have to go to class once just to ask questions. Human Evolution wasn't exactly complex though, it was just memorization.

That's true, but it's probably not only in Human Evolution that professors would just read from the book.

Originally Posted by jhan523

But it you don't understand the book then you are basically screwed for that entire section.

Don't worry, the books is pretty clear if you don't understand something or you can just google something.. Dr. Dej is a good prof but she does go pretty fast at times so I had to learn some things from the book.

Originally Posted by jhan523

That's true, but it's probably not only in Human Evolution that professors would just read from the book.

Yeah, I guess for a harder topic it might be a bit more of a drag.

This course taught by Dr. Dej, was overall a decent course.

I didn't think Dr. Dej was the greatest lecturer, she didn't have a good stage presence, and she was a bit too nice (in that she would pretty much never say to someone that they were misunderstanding something, even when they were. She would just say "well, that's an interesting idea, and it could be right, but in general I think that this way is correct". I really hope that these people caught their mistakes later on).

But she was also extremely nice, helpful, and posted excellent lecture notes. And I found the tests to be very fair.

I think midterm 1 was 15% and midterm 2 was 20%. Both midterms were pretty fair. I actually did not so hot on the first one because I was lulled into a false sense of security by her practice problems, but the midterm and exam went much better after I learned that those weren't the best indicator of how well you understood the material (still helpful though).

There was also an assignment worth 19% of your mark. 15% was for the final draft, 2% was for each peer review check point. Overall the assignment wasn't too bad, probably it will boost your mark. You get a specific protein where a mutation will cause cancer, and then you look at a specific cancer linked to that protein. You write about the protein, its role in the cell cycle, how it mutates, what signalling pathways its involved in, the cancer itself, how it metastasises, treatments, etc. I can't remember how long it was supposed to be, but I think it was about 6 pages double spaced. Marking seemed fair enough.

The exam was also pretty fair. It was worth 35%, and was a pretty good representation of what we learned. It was focused on the material from after the last midterm, and didn't really involve much application. Mainly it was memorizing and understanding concepts.

There were also smaller quizzes and assignments that made up the rest of the mark, worth 2-3% each.

I liked this course overall, and would recommend taking it.