This class was the bane of my existence. I would rather be in BE 100 than this class any day. Besides a handful of guest lecturers, this class was pretty much a waste of time and it has wayyyyy too much busy work for a two-unit class. I can see this class being semi-useful if you are a freshman. But if you are a sophomore or a transfer (junior) it is pretty much a waste of time. I am not someone who leaves everything for the last minute but this class was super annoying in that I always ended up leaving all the work last minute.

The class has two long article summaries which u have to write in single space, 11pt font, and a final summary about what you learned, and a bunch of other busy work. My best advice is to try and get all the assignments as early as you can so that you can focus on your other classes that actually matter. The assignments are not hard, they are just extremely pointless and boring.

This is the intro to bioengineering seminar, which incoming freshmen and incoming transfers into bioengineering take. It's a 2 unit class as opposed to the 1 unit class of literally every other engineering major because there's more work. Like there's an actual lecture and a discussion, and you have to go to all of them.

The lecture is comprised of guest speakers coming every week, and you have to make weekly journal entries on them which you turn in.

During discussion, you usually do something based on a reading assignment you get for the week, and you have to annotate the reading on Perusall and respond to people's comments. It's tedious but fine.

There are two article summaries you have to do for this class. The first one is a group one, and the second one is individual. You really need to plan ahead for it. My group took 3 days for the article summary and got an A, but I knew other groups that got C's and B's on the summary.

Other than the article summaries, there's a bunch of other busy work such as searching for a job, taking this useless life values survey, and a career essay at the very end that summarizes what you learned.

It's meant to be an easy A, but the work involved is way more than other engineering seminars.

One third about materials science, one third about blood clotting, and one third about the immune system. One of those classes that's hard not necessarily because of the material, but because of the simply odd test questions. For better or worse, almost your entire grade is made of a few tests that each have a small number of questions, so the workload is manageable but your grade is very sensitive to each mistake.

I think this class deserves credit for an especially bizarre grading policy that was implemented after people did badly on the first exam: if you score top 5 in the class for the second midterm or final, you get an A in the class automatically. That only helps the very best people in the class do even better. If you topscore on the second exam, you have no reason to touch the last third of the material, so you end up less educated than everyone else. Also the second exam was optionally online, so you could easily cheat your way into this policy. The median grade for the final was slightly below 60%, so this policy clearly did not do much to improve things. It's fine to reward people for doing well, but to see that most of the class is struggling and address that by boosting the top 10 people even higher is funny.

BE 180.

It's a required class, but it is in need of major reforming.

The professor seems like a nice person, but I think he uses Wu's slides from when Wu used to teach the class....and I'm not a fan of Wu's slides (I took 176 with him).

The issue with the lectures is that you have a TON of details thrown at you and when it comes to the midterm and final, you are not sure what you need to know. In the end, it's about memorizing some statements and some random graphs without feeling like you actually LEARNED something. A simple study guide with what we need to know (with no tricks) would be nice!

If this professor teaches the class, then he needs to make his OWN slides and give us the material we can actually USE and APPLY instead of giving us jargon.

I will say that the TAs for this class were good, and this is just another example of how the TAs would teach the class better than the actual teacher (it was the same case for 176).

Our grading scheme ended up being 10% in-class question (ask once throughout the quarter), 15% a library assignment, 25% article summary, 10% abstract, 35% for the group podcast, and 5% for some surveys/questionnaires.

This class basically just consists of guest lecturers coming every week and talking about their research. We had a few assignments due throughout the quarter based on the class reading articles and summarizing them/utilizing library tools. Final project was a group project based off a chosen topic (we were given a list). The work load was pretty light in the first few weeks but we ended up having this 12-15 minute podcast assignment due week 10, which was not fun to worry about during finals. If anything, I'd follow the recommended schedule and get writing and recording done early.

Basically, an A in this class is guaranteed. However, you do have to put a relatively heavy amount of work in for a 2 unit class. The article summary takes a very long time to do. It took me like 12 hours, and that's not even longer than average. Definitely start a few days in advance. The podcast was annoying, but the bar is set very low for an A on that so don't stress. You can skip lecture if you want, because you only have to ask one question, and once that's done it doesn't matter. However, the guest lecturers were often pretty interesting so I liked going (most of the time) anyway. The second part of lecture, which he calls "writing workshop," is literally completely useless and basically the equivalent to 6th grade English class. Feel free to leave after the guest lecturer. A nice little GPA booster with no stress, but more work than it should be.

Looks like a lot of work, really isn't. Kinda boring tho but its a required course so whatever.

I don't know why this class got so many negative reviews. Content is extremely interesting (physio) and the professor is quite knowledgable and good at communicating the working mechanisms of systems biology. A useful class for every bioengineer (especially pre-meds) and taught by someone who knows what there doing. Also, the slides are good, reviews that say otherwise are capping.

I agree with the other most recent review. His slides are pretty decent, it's useful information, and he does a good job presenting it. A lot of the content isn't difficult to digest, and lots of the info from class can be supplemented in other areas online if you need a different perspective. Minimal time commitment and not the hardest thing by any means.

This class is very different than other engineering classes and it is heavily designed for all the pre-meds. However, the class still has lots of very very interesting information and I learned a lot about biocompatibility and the immune system. However, Professor Linsley isn't the best at telling you what you really need to know for the exams. The lectures COVER a lot of information and although he says "not to memorize" you do have to know the content very well to do good on the exams (aka memorize). The exams test deeper understanding and not just memorization but you do need to have all the terms memorized so you can give deeper explanations. This year was his second time teaching and so the exams were mostly free response and some multiple-choice questions. The main problem for this class was that since there was so much information on the slides and he never told us what are the important things we needed to know it meant that it was very easy to lose a few points here and there which resulted in lots of % drop (since the exams were only out of about 50 points, so each one point mistake was worth 2%). However, he and the TAs were nice enough to offer a small extra credit opportunity and they also graded the final exam very leniently.

We also did lose a few days of class time because of all the annoying protests so he had to cut out some stuff. The main problem for this class is the fact that he doesn't use his own slides, and rather uses the ones from the previous professor.

Overall this class is very different from other engineering classes as it isn't very computational and rather much more understanding of biology and how that incorporates into the design of biomedical devices and implants. He is a good guy but just not a very good teacher but I am hoping he will be better next year since he will have more experience.