Bio 4T03 - MacInsiders - Student-run McMaster University Help Forum

Harlequin

Mark Breakdown:
Midterm 1 - 30%
Midterm 2 - 30%
Tutorial participation - 10%
Presentation - 30%

The first half of the class is taught by Dr. Fahnestock and deals with neurotrophic factors, signalling by neurotrophins and neurodegenerative disorders. Dr. Fahnestock is a really good professor and personally, I enjoyed her part of the course much more than the second half. The second half is taught by Dr. Nurse and builds on material from Bio 3P03. Dr. Nurse is a little boring to listen to but his slides are very clear and most everything you need to know is on them.

There is no textbook for the class. Every week, we were given 3 papers to read that would be presented by students the following week during tutorial. The presentation was ~30 minutes long and you got 10 days to prepare for it. In order to be able to participate in during the tutorial discussions, you were expected to read the papers ahead of time and although the papers were testable material, very little from the papers was actually tested. I found that as long as you listened to the presentations, you could ask questions and not have to read the papers ahead of time.

The first midterm covered all of Dr. Fahnestock's material while the second covered all of Dr. Nurse's material and was not cumulative. The first midterm was VERY long but it was pretty easy and everyone did quite well. The second midterm was a little bit harder and our marks were adjusted so everyone did fairly well too. We were never given a mark for the presentation, just an email with written comments and at the end of the term the two professors and the TA got together and assigned everyone marks.

I'd recommend this class if you like 3P03 (Dr. Nurse's half of this class is much easier than 3P03) and are interested in neurotrophic factors/neurodegenerative disorders.