LIFESCI 107
Genetics
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, 75 minutes. Requisites: courses 7C, 23L, Chemistry 14A (or 20A), 14C (or 30A). Not open for credit to students with credit for course 4. Advanced Mendelian genetics, recombination, biochemical genetics, mutation, DNA, genetic code, gene regulation, genes in populations. Letter grading.
Units: 5.0
Units: 5.0
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Most Helpful Review
Winter 2021 - Professor Chen was a very dedicated and professor. Her lectures were engaging and well-paced, and she listened to what her students needed to focus on to help optimize the lectures to what most people were struggling with. She also provides ample opportunities for extra credit (which you should take, they just involve taking a small survey to help her optimize the lectures). The class is structured so that you watch pre-class lectures (20-50 minutes depending on the week, 2x speed is helpful), attend lectures 2x a week (live, required with clickers), attend discussion 1x a week. Before the first lecture of each week, you take a pre-class quiz based on the pre-class lectures, and at the end of each week you take a quiz created by your discussion section TA. The exams and quizzes are all quite straightforward (1 or 2 controversial questions here and there on long exams), but the TA's and Dr. Chen are very fair and listen to student concerns and will consider regrades. The best part, you get to do corrections on your exams (midterms AND final), which will allow you to get about 20 points back per exam (depends on # of questions you missed), which could bring your exam score up 20%.
Winter 2021 - Professor Chen was a very dedicated and professor. Her lectures were engaging and well-paced, and she listened to what her students needed to focus on to help optimize the lectures to what most people were struggling with. She also provides ample opportunities for extra credit (which you should take, they just involve taking a small survey to help her optimize the lectures). The class is structured so that you watch pre-class lectures (20-50 minutes depending on the week, 2x speed is helpful), attend lectures 2x a week (live, required with clickers), attend discussion 1x a week. Before the first lecture of each week, you take a pre-class quiz based on the pre-class lectures, and at the end of each week you take a quiz created by your discussion section TA. The exams and quizzes are all quite straightforward (1 or 2 controversial questions here and there on long exams), but the TA's and Dr. Chen are very fair and listen to student concerns and will consider regrades. The best part, you get to do corrections on your exams (midterms AND final), which will allow you to get about 20 points back per exam (depends on # of questions you missed), which could bring your exam score up 20%.
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2022 - This class was co-taught by Laski and Cohn, but since Laski has retired, Cohn gets the review. The structure is as such: Midterm 1 100 points Midterm 2 100 points Final (6/6/22) 200 points Pre-lecture Quiz (16 quizzes x 2 pts) 32 points (lowest dropped) Clicker Questions (18 lectures x 2 pts) 36 points (two lowest dropped) Discussion Section (8 attendances x 4 pts) 32 points (two lowest dropped) Up until the first midterm, everything is pretty much a review of LS7B - lot of Punnett squares and pedigrees and the questions are straightforward probabilities/multiplying fractions. After the second midterm, bacterial genetics is introduced and it's still pretty interesting and easy to do well. The averages for both midterms with 90+. After the second midterm, however, it becomes super difficult to understand Cohn's lectures and people starting flunking the pre-lecture quizzes en masse. The final predominantly covers this latter portion of the class, so many people did poorly and their grades pre-final and post-final were significantly different. There are 4 points of EC on each exam that can help you, but overall, this class started off easy and then the final kicked out butts.
Spring 2022 - This class was co-taught by Laski and Cohn, but since Laski has retired, Cohn gets the review. The structure is as such: Midterm 1 100 points Midterm 2 100 points Final (6/6/22) 200 points Pre-lecture Quiz (16 quizzes x 2 pts) 32 points (lowest dropped) Clicker Questions (18 lectures x 2 pts) 36 points (two lowest dropped) Discussion Section (8 attendances x 4 pts) 32 points (two lowest dropped) Up until the first midterm, everything is pretty much a review of LS7B - lot of Punnett squares and pedigrees and the questions are straightforward probabilities/multiplying fractions. After the second midterm, bacterial genetics is introduced and it's still pretty interesting and easy to do well. The averages for both midterms with 90+. After the second midterm, however, it becomes super difficult to understand Cohn's lectures and people starting flunking the pre-lecture quizzes en masse. The final predominantly covers this latter portion of the class, so many people did poorly and their grades pre-final and post-final were significantly different. There are 4 points of EC on each exam that can help you, but overall, this class started off easy and then the final kicked out butts.
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Most Helpful Review
Fall 2023 - I LOVED THIS CLASS!!! Professor Ko is an amazing lecturer and is super helpful during office hours--she offered both content and non-content OH this past quarter, which was amazing because you could talk to her about class stuff but also chat about life during non-content OH and get to know her personally. She never says that content is easy and lets us know that she finds certain materials challenging too, which is comforting to hear, especially in an upper division life sciences class. We used iClicker, but honestly I did not mind because lectures were always engaging so there was no reason not to go in-person. In this class we used iClicker (participation), videos + video quizzes (flipped classroom), weekly quizzes, discussion worksheets, and Slack (to post questions and receive answers from other students, TAs, and the professor). Exams (two midterms and a final) were always fair--they covered content adequately, there was enough time to work on all problems efficiently, and the difficulty was just fine. They were open book as well, which helped relieve stress (I made a master study guide using all the learning objectives which helped me save time during the actual exam to look up anything in case I forgot a concept). There were exam revision quizzes too, which had similar questions from the exam (not the same ones, just similar), so they encouraged you to review your exam and if you did well on the revision quiz, you could earn some points back. Professor Ko also offered extra credit, which was very sweet and super helpful in case you couldn't complete work certain weeks or needed to make up for any lower grades. Overall I loved this class and would definitely take it again. Some of the material covered in LS107 is the same stuff covered in LS7B, but I feel like I understand certain concepts better in this class (like Mendelian genetics, nondisjunction, etc.) because Professor Ko would take the time to walk through each topic and question in a step-by-step fashion. Anyways, Professor Ko is just an amazing person and it was a treat to be in her class this past quarter. Wishing her all the best in her future classes <3 P.S. Big shout out to her organized and pretty slides and syllabus. Her slides were absolutely perfect--she used very clear figures and images so we obtained a visual understanding of material. Her syllabus had a table of contents and hyperlinks, make it easy to use and navigate. Considering she was fresh out of her PhD program and this is her first time teaching LS107 at UCLA, she did a fantastic job :)
Fall 2023 - I LOVED THIS CLASS!!! Professor Ko is an amazing lecturer and is super helpful during office hours--she offered both content and non-content OH this past quarter, which was amazing because you could talk to her about class stuff but also chat about life during non-content OH and get to know her personally. She never says that content is easy and lets us know that she finds certain materials challenging too, which is comforting to hear, especially in an upper division life sciences class. We used iClicker, but honestly I did not mind because lectures were always engaging so there was no reason not to go in-person. In this class we used iClicker (participation), videos + video quizzes (flipped classroom), weekly quizzes, discussion worksheets, and Slack (to post questions and receive answers from other students, TAs, and the professor). Exams (two midterms and a final) were always fair--they covered content adequately, there was enough time to work on all problems efficiently, and the difficulty was just fine. They were open book as well, which helped relieve stress (I made a master study guide using all the learning objectives which helped me save time during the actual exam to look up anything in case I forgot a concept). There were exam revision quizzes too, which had similar questions from the exam (not the same ones, just similar), so they encouraged you to review your exam and if you did well on the revision quiz, you could earn some points back. Professor Ko also offered extra credit, which was very sweet and super helpful in case you couldn't complete work certain weeks or needed to make up for any lower grades. Overall I loved this class and would definitely take it again. Some of the material covered in LS107 is the same stuff covered in LS7B, but I feel like I understand certain concepts better in this class (like Mendelian genetics, nondisjunction, etc.) because Professor Ko would take the time to walk through each topic and question in a step-by-step fashion. Anyways, Professor Ko is just an amazing person and it was a treat to be in her class this past quarter. Wishing her all the best in her future classes <3 P.S. Big shout out to her organized and pretty slides and syllabus. Her slides were absolutely perfect--she used very clear figures and images so we obtained a visual understanding of material. Her syllabus had a table of contents and hyperlinks, make it easy to use and navigate. Considering she was fresh out of her PhD program and this is her first time teaching LS107 at UCLA, she did a fantastic job :)
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Most Helpful Review
Summer 2020 - Originally, I was not going to write this review because I felt like the only one who experienced these problems. But, after seeing another student share similar concerns, I'd like to also share my opinion. It was almost impossible to contact this professor. He originally said he would not give his email out because he checked CampusWire more often, which is completely acceptable, except there were multiple occasions where he did not log onto CampusWire for 4+ days straight in a 6 week Summer Session (you can check when someone last logged on via DMs). When he did log on to CampusWire, he often only upvoted student responses instead of actually answering the questions themselves, even when some questions were left unanswered for 3+ days. Additionally, he made multiple mistakes on his first midterm and instead of acknowledging them, he just wrote on the answer key that one answer was "more correct" than his incorrect answer (even though there was only one actually correct answer). Students won't bother checking answers they already got right when reviewing the answer key, so many students were left making the same mistake on the Midterm II and Final Exam (I could tell because one of the review questions another student made for future exams was similar in concept and I had to explain it to fellow confused students). Despite this, as long as you take this class with a friend so you can ask questions to them, this class is an easy A.
Summer 2020 - Originally, I was not going to write this review because I felt like the only one who experienced these problems. But, after seeing another student share similar concerns, I'd like to also share my opinion. It was almost impossible to contact this professor. He originally said he would not give his email out because he checked CampusWire more often, which is completely acceptable, except there were multiple occasions where he did not log onto CampusWire for 4+ days straight in a 6 week Summer Session (you can check when someone last logged on via DMs). When he did log on to CampusWire, he often only upvoted student responses instead of actually answering the questions themselves, even when some questions were left unanswered for 3+ days. Additionally, he made multiple mistakes on his first midterm and instead of acknowledging them, he just wrote on the answer key that one answer was "more correct" than his incorrect answer (even though there was only one actually correct answer). Students won't bother checking answers they already got right when reviewing the answer key, so many students were left making the same mistake on the Midterm II and Final Exam (I could tell because one of the review questions another student made for future exams was similar in concept and I had to explain it to fellow confused students). Despite this, as long as you take this class with a friend so you can ask questions to them, this class is an easy A.
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2024 - I love this prof but he completely changed the format of this course and the whole time it was miserable for me. We had SO MANY QUIZZES every week to the point where I'd forget about them completely because of how many there were to keep track of. It used to be almost 100% As in this class, but now you have to score almost 100% on every single exam to get an A in the class and that's near impossible. Also the sheer amount of people who purely cheated (by taking exams in huge groups behind the profs back) was extremely disappointing and embarrassing. Tell me why I got a B+ in this class despite scoring a 95% on the final and a 97% on midterm too. I scored around a 72% on the first midterm (my fault for not studying enough bc i was also enrolled in 3 upper-division chem classes simultaneously) but I'm really disappointed in how many people got near 100% in the class after purely cheating. The material is also extremely dense and not very intuitive, so I don't recommend this at ALL if you don't love biology and statistics (yes there is a lot of math). I got an A+ in LS7B and still struggled a lot towards the beginning of this course because of how many quizzes there were and the high pressure of needing to perform exceptional on all exams.
Winter 2024 - I love this prof but he completely changed the format of this course and the whole time it was miserable for me. We had SO MANY QUIZZES every week to the point where I'd forget about them completely because of how many there were to keep track of. It used to be almost 100% As in this class, but now you have to score almost 100% on every single exam to get an A in the class and that's near impossible. Also the sheer amount of people who purely cheated (by taking exams in huge groups behind the profs back) was extremely disappointing and embarrassing. Tell me why I got a B+ in this class despite scoring a 95% on the final and a 97% on midterm too. I scored around a 72% on the first midterm (my fault for not studying enough bc i was also enrolled in 3 upper-division chem classes simultaneously) but I'm really disappointed in how many people got near 100% in the class after purely cheating. The material is also extremely dense and not very intuitive, so I don't recommend this at ALL if you don't love biology and statistics (yes there is a lot of math). I got an A+ in LS7B and still struggled a lot towards the beginning of this course because of how many quizzes there were and the high pressure of needing to perform exceptional on all exams.
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