BIOL 3000

So this review comes from the full COVID semester and a student who got an A in the class.

As with every other class and thing in the world, this semester was like no other. Normally, Wormington set up the distribution of class to be 3 midterms each worth 20%, a non-cumulative final worth 25%, and homework worth 15% (on which you can get over 100). This semester, everything was worth 20%, the final was still non-cumulative, and the max score for the homework was about 122%. All lectures were held on zoom synchronously MWF, even on exam days, but were also recorded and available to rewatched up to the night before an exam. This was really helpful, because if you've read any review of Wormington's cell bio, you'll see everyone saying he goes very quickly through the material every day. On the first day of class, he went through in 10 minutes what a normal teacher would take 50 minutes to cover, and that got worse as the class went on. Good thing, is you get used to it, and by the end of the semester I found that I only rewatched lectures to get small tidbits that I missed. The first three exams were difficult, but I ended up getting 90, 94, and 90 on them, respectively. If you start studying a week before, they are very doable. The last exam was very difficult, and I ended up getting an 82 on it, even though I studied for about two weeks for it during finals week. If you do the math, that averages out to an 89 average. How did I get an A? The homework. Five questions assigned after each class and 8 am before the next class. On average, I spent about 1 hour on each homework set. Some days they were really easy, and I spent about 15 to 20 minutes on them, other days I would spend up to 2 hours on them. Don't spend more than 2 hours on them, because even though they come from old exams, they do not cover everything you need to know for the exam. There are several bonus homework assignments, and this semester these allowed the max homework score to be 122. I go a 118 on the homework, netting me ~94-95 overall in the class, in the A range. Wormington also gives essential questions for each unit, stuff you can tell he covers when you go back through and study everything for the exams. I would recommend making sure you can answer those questions, and going through the slides and make sure you can explain everything on the slides. If you can, go to lecture live, then rewatch later before the next lecture. This will allow you to get the most out of the recorded lectures and not have to rewatch every lecture on a binge before the exam. His office hours are very useful, as he often gives away homework answers and can answer a lot of questions you might have. An A in this class is very doable, but requires a significant amount of work.

This class taught me so much, and I always went into every exam confident that I had a great grasp on the material and could do well, but Wormington's exams are incredibly hard to do well on. He is a good lecturer and teaches well, but at the end of the semester he decided to change the grading scale from the typical 3/7 cutoffs for -/+ grades to 2/8- effectively curving anyone close to a + down, and anyone in the - range up. When other students questioned this his responses were incredibly and unnecessarily rude. I personally should have gotten a B+ and was curved down to a B because of his grading scale change.

This class was very challenging but so interesting and informative. It has definitely been the biology course at UVA where I’ve learned the most and have retained a lot of information as well. Professor Wormington is a great professor and I found him to be very good at explaining the challenging content. Exams are definitely challenging but I’d say they are mostly fair (in comparison to BIOL 3010 Genetics exams). For studying, I began studying a week before exams. Homework questions are a good way to check your understanding of the material as these questions are from previous exams.

Extremely difficult course. Dr. Wormington is enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but his lectures are very disorganized and difficult to follow. He also does not explain concepts particularly clearly in my opinion. The tests are difficult, but his confusing lectures are the main challenge.

This class is hard solely due to the all the proteins you need to know. Wormington is a great lecturer and is extremely knowledgable on the topics he teaches, but he rarely says something in the 50 minute lectures I am not trying to write down. He did record his lectures and posted the audio after class so I used that when studying to just go back and take really detailed notes. I stopped going to discussion about halfway through the semester because the TA was terrible and I never learned anything new from it. The homeworks can either be really easy or super hard, but they are old exam questions so it is helpful to gauge how to asks questions about the material prior to taking the test. There are also bonus homework and please do them. Homework is 20% of the grade and each of the 4 exams were worth 20%. I didn't go to office hours so I don't know how helpful they were. If you know one or two people in the class I think a really good way to study is just to go throgh the powerpoints and explain the processes then go through the homework quesitons in detail to understand why the correct answer is right but also understand how each wrong answer is wrong. Good luck! #tCFfall2021

I am not a biology major, but an envi sci major doing a bio minor. I loved this class. Wormington is an amazing lecturer and very interesting. He curves the grade brackets at the end of the class. The exams are hard but if you study you can get B-A’s on every exam. He also offers bonus homework which saved my grade. I got a C on the last exam (which was the hardest imo) and B+/A’s on the others, but the homework was so helpful it ended boosting my final grade to an A despite doing poorly on the last exam. Wormington is great and very accommodating and this course is really interesting. I never considered myself to like cell biology/micro bio but this course changed my perspective. Do the readings and the hw thoroughly and you’ll be fine

I found reviewing previous reviews on the instructor and course to be really helpful for starting this course. Prof. Wormington is a great lecturer and connects concepts really well. He just covers a LOT of content within one lecture.

Textbook? -- I found that while it can be helpful for fully understanding a process, it can be a bit difficult to read and go too much in-depth for what Prof. Wormington covers in lecture/on exams. After reading other reviews here and on Reddit, I ultimately decided to not purchase the textbook and did fine without it. In case you are worried about needing it after the bookstore deadline, there may be copies available elsewhere on the Internet...

Lectures? -- I echo the common sentiment that the best thing to do during lectures is essentially transcribe everything he says. Understanding what he says aloud and what he has on his slides will be key to doing well on exams and grasping the content. Unlike Kittlesen, he does put a significant amount of information on his slides-- they are extremely helpful! While there are other ways of taking down notes for lecture, I personally found it best to type up notes, then add pictures of slides post-lecture. He usually permits the use of phones to record lectures, but due to COVID recorded them and uploaded them. I think recordings can be very helpful in the case that you missed parts of what he said, as there can be crucial details.

Homework? -- Much shorter than Intro Bio's, 5 multiple-choice questions. The information you need to answer them is generally present in the slides/said during lecture, so read carefully. They really add up. There are also occasionally bonus homework questions that he will post based on bonus readings related to course content-- they are worth the time to answer them! I think mine personally boosted my course grade by a couple of points!

Discussion? -- said to be optional but highly recommended. I personally found it helpful for reviewing that week's content and they usually only go for 1-1.5 hours. It depends on the graduate TA helping out, as they lead the discussion. However, the one for this past semester was very committed to helping students understand course concepts, so YMMV.

Exams? -- typically around 50 questions, all multiple choice (but there are a lot of none of the above/all of the above). Know the processes and concepts well enough that you can explain it to someone else, and read over the slides to grab any smaller details your notes may lack. Questions can vary from extremely straightforward to very application-based. Make sure to look over past homework questions as well.

I personally cried before each of the two first exams out of stress and ended up doing fine in the course. It's a difficult course, but ask questions and go to office hours sooner than later! #tCFfall2021

The previous reviews all speak for themselves. He records the lectures on his cell phone, so make sure you relisten and take notes on everything that he says. There is content in every sentence. The exams are very challenging, so make sure you understand all of the HW questions and go to his office hours if you are ever in doubt. A lot of the exam questions are very convoluted and muddle many concepts together. Study groups are very helpful because teaching other students is a great way to ensure that you have mastered the material. There is a slight curve and the 5% extra credit HW is the main curve for your grade. This is a very stressful and challenging course. There is only one graduate TA that runs a weekly discussion, which is not always the most helpful because she does not know the types of questions that Prof. Wormington will ask on the exams.
Here are the statistics for fall 2021:
Mean = 82%
Median = 84%. Course GPA 2.82
A+ 98-104% 18 students
A 90-97% 101 students
A- 89% 16 students
B+ 88% 19 students
B 80-87% 112 students
B- 79% 13 students
C+ 78% 11 students
C 70-77% 45 students
C- 69% 2 students
D+ 68% 2 students
D 60-67% 21 students
D- 58-59% 7 students
F ≤55% 22 students
INC 2 students. Total of 389 students. The exam averages are in the 70s and get higher as the semester progresses. There are 4 exams and each one is 20% of your grade. HW is another 20% (it appears that he gave full credit on the HW even if you did not get all of the answers correct). There is also extra credit HW (5% added to your overall grade), which is answering MC questions on research articles. The grades you see above include that for most students. He rounds overall grades to the nearest unit percentage, as shown above, so no decimals. 89.5% is the bare minimum for an A. 88.5 is a bare minimum for an A-. He makes the plus and minus margins very small.

Cell bio has it's reputation of being extremely difficult, a reputation that Mike also acknowledges based off of the sheer amount of content needed to cover. On the first day of class Mike said this to us (based off of my memory, might not be exactly what he said): "All of you have probably heard that there is something of a reputation about this course and myself. It is completely justified, it is true. But as a disclaimer, its not my fault, not your fault either, cell biology is just this complicated".
I went into the class as a third year and having finished most of my other bio core courses so I was a bit more prepared to grind. If you are coming fresh out of intro-bio into this class, be prepared to make drastic changes in how you study and prepare for classes/exams (either stategies or amount of time or both, in most cases).
I got an A in the class. First I know ya'll want to hear about grading. Mike has quite a unique way of forming grade brackets, he gives only 1 point brackets for +/- grades and he doesn't annouce the exact brackets until the very end (in my case after final exam grades were out). In the end, the brackets for grades will be something like 91+ be an A, 90-91 be an A-, 89-90 be B+, 81-88% be B something like that (the brackets change according to the overall results of the class. Sometimes an 88 might be an A, you never know until the end).
Grading is based off of three midterms, one final (all are non-cumulative, the final was the same as all mideterms just for three hours rather than two), lecture homework (three each week, open after lecture and due before the next lecture) and extra credit homeworks. The biggest takeaway to doing good in the class is to PUT ALL YOU'VE GOT INTO HOMEWORK, my three midterms averaged out around a typical B~B+ and I stumbled on my final with a C+, the homework and extra credit still buffed my grade to an A.
Mike is the living definition of a "walking textbook", unbelieveably knowledgeable about the stuff he teaches (the guy's been teaching this class for thirty one years) and you can really tell that he tries to make the content as understandable and enjoyable as possible. That being said, to get the content down he speaks quite quickly during lecture, sometimes too quickly for an international student like myself. During our semester he would post lecture recordings on Collab and I ended up re-listening to most (if not all) recordings multiple times. There's a lot of content in cell bio but pay attention to the amount of detail and time that Mike allocates to different stuff, since those are usually the main focus in midterms. His slides are quite informative, efficently loaded with key content and sometimes I find myself taking notes that have already been written on his slides.
I personally did not attend any of his or the TA's office hours just due to time conflicts, but I have to say that our TA Lindsay is quite your ideal TA for a class like this. Discussion sections are optional and she goes over the content based on how frequently did students reach out to her to ask questions about it. She provides different ways of understanding a single topic so if the way Mike presented the content in class was not for you, she probably will have something that helps. She's really approachable over email and is very determined to help students succeed in this class so never be too afraid to ask.
The textbook is your typical bio textbook, expensive and mostly too in-detail for the scope of this class. Every unit Mike posts reading assignments on Collab for you to read (just a list of stuff he recommends to read, it's not a graded assignment) but I personally think that it's not necessary to read all of them, his lectures are enough to make it through most of the class. He makes it quite clear that some topics covered in exams will not be covered in lecture but is found in the textbook so make sure you get a grasp of those (uncovered exam material is rare and will be very clearly stated in reading assignment files). If you're stuggling with that just reach out to Mike or the TA. The way I used the textbook was mostly during exam prep, as sometimes there will be a certain piece of content that just does not make any sense to me in lecture. Many times the diagrams and images Mike puts in his slides come from the textbook so just look for those or just search for keys words regarding the topic and the corresponding text will have tons of detail to help you understand.
Overall, this is arguably the most content heavy and challenging course for a bio student at UVA, but is far from the most painful to take. Be prepared to grind, if possible avoid taking other challenging classes at the same time (which I know is a luxury of taking this as a third year since I had orgo down before cell). The class provides you with tons of resources to improve so use what you need and the results will be satisfying.

This class definitely lived up to its reputation. Absolute jump scare. First, Professor Wormington is actually a pretty good lecturer, he explains concepts relatively well. Definitely in depth. However, he is somehow able to defy basic biology and speak for 50 minutes without taking a single breath and just run through 5 signal pathways in one lecture like it is nothing. So yeah, the class is a lot all at once. Each unit is quite literally like drinking from a fire hose and the only suggestion I can offer is transcribe his lectures word for word before taking the necessary 2 hours a day to study each unit. Because there will be concepts that he spends a maximum of 2 minutes speaking on or will say you do not need to worry about it for the test and low and behold come to find 7 questions on the test on that very same concept. The tests are excruciating. Professor Wormington has a scarily good skill for asking extremely analytical questions that require you to synthesize information from multiple different concepts and come up with a reasoning behind a specific defect in a system or pathway. I hear the other professor is a little better so I would say try that first, but if not, its not completely hopeless. Professor Wormington has homework questions and bonus assignments that are able to offset the exams but don't rely on them to completely resuscitate your grade.#tCFfall22