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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I didn't love the content of this course but the way it was laid out and organized made it fairly easy for me to do well and keep up with it regardless. The lectures were online and the majority were 1.5-2 hours in length. This was a little annoying because they took forever to watch (there were a lot of small details and if you try to take detailed notes it can be very slow) but you could make sure that you caught all those small details that you might otherwise miss in a live lecture. There were also weekly in class lectures that built upon the online modules and a few of them were taught by guest lecturers. It was important to go to these as they were tested on both midterms and the exam (sometimes short answer questions worth several marks). One bonus was that the tests and exam were NOT cumulative which was amazing considering there was so much content. The first midterm was 15%, the second was 20%, the final exam was 35%, there were a few small tutorial assignments (2%), online quizzes were 10%, and a paper worth 18%. The paper was marked pretty hard (that's what it sounded like at least, I thought mine was marked relatively fairly) but the midterms were fair and relatively easy if you knew your stuff and understood the material. With that said, the content did get more difficult throughout the course.

Originally Posted by shelbs

I didn't love the content of this course but the way it was laid out and organized made it fairly easy for me to do well and keep up with it regardless. The lectures were online and the majority were 1.5-2 hours in length. This was a little annoying because they took forever to watch (there were a lot of small details and if you try to take detailed notes it can be very slow) but you could make sure that you caught all those small details that you might otherwise miss in a live lecture. There were also weekly in class lectures that built upon the online modules and a few of them were taught by guest lecturers. It was important to go to these as they were tested on both midterms and the exam (sometimes short answer questions worth several marks). One bonus was that the tests and exam were NOT cumulative which was amazing considering there was so much content. The first midterm was 15%, the second was 20%, the final exam was 35%, there were a few small tutorial assignments (2%), online quizzes were 10%, and a paper worth 18%. The paper was marked pretty hard (that's what it sounded like at least, I thought mine was marked relatively fairly) but the midterms were fair and relatively easy if you knew your stuff and understood the material. With that said, the content did get more difficult throughout the course.

Did you find that the short answer sections of the test were marked pretty harshly? And how is Alison as an IA? I heard she's not pleasant lol.

I actually liked Alison, she was helpful and when I thought I had mono she was really nice lol. I think as long as you address her respectfully she is fine. I thought the short answers were really fair questions and I did really well on them so I was happy with the marking, however they were the kind of questions where I knew the answer as soon as I read the question and the marking should have been just as straight forward. I found the short answers a little more conceptual on the exam but I had no issues with how they were marked (wasn't disappointed when I got my final mark). I was worried about the marking but didn't find it unfair or nit-picky