If you love bio and are willing to put in the time, this is an absolutely amazing course. Professor Manson is really engaging, and I found her lectures to be a lot of fun. Some say her tests are impossible, but I found that they were definitely challenging, but very much doable if you really understood the material that had been covered. Knowing definitions is great but it won't help you on the exam unless you actually understand what that definition means, and how it can be applied to real world examples. As others have mentioned the assigned reading isn't really necessary to do well in this class (with some exceptions), but lecture attendance is an absolute must. I got an A on the (non-cumulative) final and I didn't read the textbook once during that last section of the course. Just study hard, and use the clicker questions and practice exams to your advantage, the exam questions are fair and reflective of the ones you've already seen. If you love ecology and evolution I can promise you you'll love this course. Plus, Professor Manson is so great that I enrolled in her class this semester just because I saw she was teaching it!

My major piece of advice is don’t let this course discourage you from being a bio major!!! I took this class and absolutely hated it that I started to reconsider my decision to be a bio major because I couldn’t imagine taking anymore courses that might be as painfully boring as this one. The material is dry and Manson doesn’t do much to make it interesting and assigns large readings where 70% if the information is useless knowledge that you won’t be tested on. A good way to approach her class is to take lecture notes ever lecture bc the slides she posts on collab are only half filled out, and then read the textbook only if you can find a section that matches the topic of the slides. This way you don’t waste time reading about phyla or other subjects that you don’t need to know about. Intro bio is important and you’ll have to suffer through but at least the material you learn becomes much more interesting in upper level biology classes.

I hated Manson. I thought she was super disorganized and didn't have a full grasp on the material she was teaching. Reading the textbook is pointless, just stick to knowing everything from the lecture slides. She teaches like she's an elementary school teacher and it's ineffective. Make sure to take notes on things she says that may not be a part of her lecture notes because it may be on the exam. She gets frustrated with her students easily and I hated going to her office hours. Her exams are ridiculous in the sense that the wording sucks. There were so many questions she had to throw out or give points for multiple answers because of how ambiguous her questions are worded. The material isn't hard, just really boring until the last unit.

As someone who DIDN'T get an A in this class (got an A-), I have compiled a list of tips and my down falls (obviously dont do what I did on my downfalls).

Tip:

1. Read the textbook reading before lecture, seriously. I recommend right before lecture since the information is fresh and lecture will make a lot more sense. The textbook also has a lot of excess information, but don't worry about it. If it's too confusing, Manson would probably either not cover it in class, therefore it wont be on the exam OR she goes over it and you understand it.

2. Quizlet your Mastering Bio. No it's not an honor offense. Even if you know the answer, double check so you can get a 100% (or atleast close to it) on every assignment. This will help you on your final grade as it is worth 10% of your final grade. She also releases a final extra credit Mastering if you miss one.

3. Go to lecture. Even if the powerpoints are very straight forward, you can still get in some participation points AND it is very helpful as some postlab questions are directly from lecture.

4. Don't take Thursday 5:30 pm labs as exams are always on Friday and those lab sessions are unnecessarily stressful because you'd rather be studying for the exam than be in lab.

5. Any post-lab question that seems abstract of difficult, ask your TA about them. They will more than likely give you hints. It is also crucial you know the general ideas of each question as they may show up on the exam.

6. In lab sometimes you'll have to carry your team mates on your back and sometimes thats for the whole semester. While this is frustrating, know that you will be learning more than them and the fact that you have to explain to them your answers multiple times will make you understand it more.

EXAM STUDY TIPS (in order of importance):

1. Make sure you've gone to lecture and did all the textbook readings BEFORE lecture.

2. GO THROUGH THE POWERPOINTS AND MEMORIZE EVERYTHING. Everything on the exam will be on the powerpoints. That's how I ended up getting 95s on exams on the second half of the semester (I wish I knew earlier). THEN CONNECT THEM TOGETHER. I recommend sitting down 3 days ahead and study for memorization, then 2 days ahead start connecting the ideas on the powerpoint since her exam mostly application and some information.


My Down Falls:

1. Think "Oh, if I do bad on this one, the rest will even it out. I'll study more on the next one." DONT. DO. THAT. Not only will that ruin your chances of getting an A, you will also be very disappointed in yourself when you show up to the exam and know you know the answer but can't answer it because you didn't study. There are only 4 exams in total, so study for all of them.

2. Not go to office hours.

I hope this is helpful!

TL;DR: Read the textbook before lecture. Pay attention in lecture. Quizlet your HW. Memorize powerpoints for exams.

Imagine this scenario--it's your first day of kindergarten. You're so excited to learn more about the world, make new friends, and have the time of your life. You walk into your little classroom. Your teacher reads everybody a very cute story book about a tree with very easy words and big pictures, so that you understand what's going on. You feel so proud of what you've learned today and think that kindergarten will be no problem for you. After a week full of those easy story books read by your teacher, the big day FINALLY comes--your kindergarten teacher passes out a test that's supposed to cover the material from the story books. You open the test, feeling greatly prepared... only to fall off your seat with a double flip from the TERRIBLE word choice and sentence structures that even Shakespeare can't backhand, and an obscure syntax both the questions and answers were written in. THIS is what Manson's class felt like to me. Lectures were terribly elementary and covered the surface of something core-related that Manson put on exams. In other words, you can learn how to do 1+3x2+5 in class. Easy, right? Manson then puts down 1+3x(2+5) on the exam. You don't know how to work PEMDAS (or BEDMAS in Canadian, in honor of this irrelevant and highly nonfunctional professor) because the lecture never covered it in detail. But with Manson's justification of the exams being "application-based," this is how you will be tested in the course. Highly unfair and more concentrated on how good your improvisation/test taking skills are, rather than pure biological knowledge. About content: Manson has a kink for plants as much as Donald Trump loves using twitter instead of being an actual president; you'll be fascinated by how this professor knows so much about how plants have sex but don't know a single detail about how humans excrete urine. And as for lab, your grade is ENTIRELY jeopardized on who your TA is. If it's a graduate student, it's likely that lab will be a tumultuous time for you as they grade assignments with a terribly narrow mind and wants to keep you for the full 2.5 hour block of lab. Sit next to someone that doesn't smell for your own sanity. Undergraduate TA's vary for every section, but they seem to be less extreme than graduate TA's. Grades are not curved with the exception of a few "bonus point" opportunities that aren't even greater than 0.5%. Exams seemed to decrease in difficulty over time, as the final had the highest average score. If you're taking this class after Kittlesen, you'll likely notice that it's hard to stay awake in class as Manson cannot engage her students in learning and her lectures are rather dull. If you REALLY love plants, this may not be that bad for you--for everyone else, I wish you the best of luck.

Not close to how great Kittlesen is. Dr. Manson is knowledgeable in specific topics, but when it comes to the human physiology and other aspects of the course, she cannot answer many questions in depth. This reflects on exams through confusing wording which she doesn't often acknowledge is confusing and misleading. She is excited about the topic and nice enough to talk to, but I felt that this class was a drag... final's pretty easy tho

This class is really interesting, and Dr. Manson is especially engaging and makes the material easy to understand.

Honestly, I really enjoyed the material that we learned for this course except for plants. But I loved learning about evolution, and invertebrates and vertebrates form and function. I felt like I really understood the material that was covered because of the way she teaches her lectures, but her exams were difficult. For her exams, her questions were very ambiguous. Sometimes, I would struggle between two possible answers because of the way she words the question. With Kittlesen, a student would explain their thinking process to Kittlesen for why they chose a certain answer, which he would actually think about why another choice could've been a possible answer choice instead of sticking to one. He actually curved exams for that reason. However, if you would argue this to Manson, she would argue that there can only be one answer. She does not curve exams. The average was always 79%, which I think is not true due to hearing some of my classmates complain about their exam score being lower than the average. I plan to declare my major as bio and I am pre-med, so I had to take this course. As for everyone else who are not bio majors, if you do not need this course, I highly suggest that you take a more narrow bio class or different science course. As for grading, there are four exams that you take, which are worth 17.5% each. There is lab every week, which is worth 20% of your grade. There is also mastering bio, which is worth 10% of your grade. She also offers extra credit opportunities, but you can only earn it by having an iClicker for class everyday (1% bonus), completing a post-self exam evaluation (1% added to your test score), and participating in a study at the beginning of the semester (0.2%). Depending on the amount of iClicker questions you got right, you can receive up to (0.5%). Overall, this course was a worthwhile class for me because it helped me appreciate biology even more.

Her tests are confusing mostly because of how she words things. I wish she actually curved like Kittlesen

Since no one does course evals and plus course forum is where it's at.. oh and this review is being written literally minutes after taking the final. Yeah, most of the other reviews embody my sentiment. I had a strong bio background in high school (took 4 years of it but sadly didn't place out rip) and still found this class pretty challenging. Overall, I would say this class is just a get-it-over with type deal. You are required to know large amounts of information which seems to be left out of the powerpoints (she also doesn't post them with annotations either). I do recognize that some exam questions are from lectures but that basically means you need to write down everything she says just in case they do happen to appear. The grade distribution puts unnecessary pressure on how lenient your TA's are at grading lab (because it is 20% of your grade) and 70% exams can be a little overwhelming . Did really well in Dave's class (basically everyone's dad God bless him <3) but with Manson, I struggled. I didn't do any of the readings for the first 3 exams and didn't pay attention in lecture and it showed so I decided to do the reading for the final (felt really prepared) and still ended up not knowing questions because of ambiguity in wording. Hopefully my clicker points which can be a potential 1.5% bonus on the overall grade, 1% test boost, those extra assignment things she had in class, and dropped exam questions (basically the exam curve) will get me over my borderline hump grade. Also, will never look at plants the same way again. Godspeed