Dr. Rigueur is an outstanding professor whose passion for research and biology shines through in every lecture. I have taken her MCDB 144, MCDB 180A, and MCDB 180B courses, and she has significantly enriched my learning experience by fostering an engaging, supportive, and enriching learning environment. From the beginning, she made me feel welcomed by ensuring that every student, including myself, was recognized and included during class discussions. Dr. Rigueur's lecture style emphasizes collaboration and teamwork, particularly through peer-editing papers, which encouraged us to voice our honest feedback to improve. As a result, I have seen significant growth in my communication and scientific writing skills.

The material assigned outside of class was thoughtfully designed. It was rigorous, but manageable which allowed me to growth as both a student and researcher without feeling overwhelmed. Under Dr. Rigueur's guidance, I improved my ability to read and comprehend primary literature which built confidence, and prepared me for graduate school.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed this class due to Dr. Rigueur's enthusiasm, passion, and expertise across multiple fields of biology. Not only did she teach the material effectively, but she also cultivated a supportive community that inspired growth and enthusiasm for science.

Dr. Rigueur is an outstanding professor whose passion for research and biology shines through in every lecture. I have taken her MCDB 144, MCDB 180A, and MCDB 180B courses, and she has significantly enriched my learning experience by fostering an engaging, supportive, and enriching learning environment. From the beginning, she made me feel welcomed by ensuring that every student, including myself, was recognized and included during class discussions. Dr. Rigueur's lecture style emphasizes collaboration and teamwork, particularly through peer-editing papers, which encouraged us to voice our honest feedback to improve. As a result, I have seen significant growth in my communication and scientific writing skills.

The material assigned outside of class was thoughtfully designed. It was rigorous, but manageable which allowed me to growth as both a student and researcher without feeling overwhelmed. Under Dr. Rigueur's guidance, I improved my ability to read and comprehend primary literature which built confidence, and prepared me for graduate school.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed this class due to Dr. Rigueur's enthusiasm, passion, and expertise across multiple fields of biology. Not only did she teach the material effectively, but she also cultivated a supportive community that inspired growth and enthusiasm for science.

I took MCDB 144 with Dr. Rigueur after taking MCDB 138 with her. Overall, I would recommend taking the courses she teaches as she is a good professor who is clearly very passionate about biology.

In terms of course content, this course is pretty biochemistry heavy as it mainly focuses on molecular mechanisms involving DNA, RNA and proteins. The trickiest part of this course in my opinion was breaking down these processes as well as keeping track of all the various components and their roles (like transcription factors) in each mechanism. That being said, don't be too intimidated as this course is very doable if you put in the effort.

I would highly recommend paying attention to content covered in lecture for this course. This shouldn't be a big problem, as Dr. Rigueur is a very engaging lecturer and facilitates discussions about class content during lecture to enhance understanding. In addition to slides, Dr. Rigueur also includes helpful videos in her lecture slides to better visualize the processes she talks about in lecture and explains what is happening in the videos as well. She also provides really helpful resources like study guides to help students study for exams.

Discussions mainly focus on research papers loosely relating to content covered in lecture. Though it may seem daunting, Dr. Rigueur provides resources in the beginning of the quarter on what to pay attention to when reading a paper with is really helpful. When I took the course, discussion consisted of discussing the assigned paper for the week.

Lastly Dr. Rigueur encourages students to reach out to her if they need help. She has office hours which are very helpful and also provides her office line for students. Highly recommend reaching out to her if help is needed!

Rigueur demonstrates a complete disrespect for her students' time. After leaving students in the dark for 4 weeks about their first midterm scores, she decided they could only find out their score in office hours for an extra week. She made these office hours at a relatively inaccessible time (long weekend, late in the evening Friday/parents' weekend/night before second midterm/etc). Those who did go to her office hours stood in a long line while she only let a few people in at a time. Most exams were not graded, so the few students in the office at a time would close their eyes while their exams were graded and then she would let them view it. Basically, this was simply just a strategy for her to get the exams done as she didn't grade them for the past 4 weeks, likely paying extra attention to her research and not the other parts of her job. This is also a completely biased and unfair grading method. And in addition to having no way of knowing your grade when it actually matters, you won't know how to calculate it because she couldn't even be bothered to create an updated syllabus. Her idea of an updated syllabus was to just fill in the correct exam dates, but those didn't even match what dates we actually ended up having the exam.

She loves to make empty promises, often saying in lecture that the grades would be posted, but not post them for at least a week later. This happened for both midterms, with midterm 2 grades being posted right before the final exam opened. She also did this with the final study guide, claiming on week 10 Tuesday that it will be posted right after lecture and she ended up posting it one day before the final exam opened after ignoring countless emails from students and the TAs. The final study guide was also labeled for MCDB 144. It's ok to teach multiple classes, but it's stupid and disrespectful to our time and effort that she couldn't even change the title of a PDF that it took her over a week and 100 reminders to post. Also, it demonstrates that she doesn't even change her curriculum between classes that much.

Her TAs are not allowed to help her and do not have any information about what's going on with grading or any information about exam details. I often begged my TA for information throughout the week leading up to exams and they had no clue what was going on, simply because it was not communicated with them. She did not post any announcements about exam details (that were often changed) and everything for this class was constantly left up in the air. Our second quiz, taken in early November, was graded today (12/23), which is the deadline for submitting final grades. If you can't handle grading, then delegate like a normal person or don't make exams in that format. It's part of your job description to get grading done somehow and keep your materials up to date. She excuses herself from all aspects of her job that aren't research by saying "I have a life too guys." Ok? So do the rest of us. I could have screamed when I heard that one.

She expects you to accommodate your time to her constantly canceled and rescheduled office hours and wait until the last second to have material to study (because her in class material is useless). Her lectures are unorganized and do not provide relevant information to the course or info to answer what is put on the study guides, leaving most people to self teach themselves and making going to lecture to hear her fragmented sentences and listen to her horrible Zoom recording and babbling about her research an utter waste of time.

The only thing that matters to her is her research, which she makes clear from the get-go. She also likes to brag about being a distinguished professor, which makes her immediately unlikeable, as you will realize within a couple weeks of lecture from her laziness and inability to form coherent, organized slides/content is a title she is not qualified for. She will act all special, lure you in with the appearance of organization. Then, you will realize she's just some fake, high and mighty lady who could possibly be one of the most disrespectful and annoying professors you will encounter at UCLA (unless you have Amber Reilly for any Ochem class).

The only thing good about this class was that we were not required to sit through lecture, which ranged from sleep-inducing to outright painful. Of course, this was a lose-lose situation, as her lecture recordings are taken from her computer on Zoom and she often walks away from the camera so you can't hear her, doesn't show her whiteboard drawings, and cuts off any announcements. Long story short, hold off on taking this class for anyone else. She will not help you unless it fits her agenda (and many things do not fit) and she does not care. Don't listen to the bots that wrote a good review for all her classes. Yes, you could do well in the class, but you'll be constantly angry and confused.

I really enjoyed this class since professor Rigueur is very passionate about teaching. Also the materials we covered are super interesting. We learned a lot of this things in cell biology such as cell signaling pathway, protein trafficking, different types of cellular organelles. What is nice about this class is that we also used several lectures to learn how to apply the basic knowledge of cell biology to construct valid experiments. I think that this really helps me on my future career. Overall, it is a very interesting and fruitful class to take.

The class materials are super interesting and really dig into the molecular level of many fascinated biological pathways. Professor Rigueur is very passionate about teaching and is very approachable during class and outside of the classroom. I would really like to take this class again since it's an enjoyable process to learn all of these interesting topics with such a passionate professor.

Workload was manageable over summer so over a regular quarter it shouldn't be too bad. Lecture wasn't mandatory but discussion was, there were 4 homework assignments and 3 exams. The exams were multiple choice questions and free response; ngl the exams were tough but if you study then you should be fine. She held weekly office hours and was always available after lecture. Honestly great professor I'd take her again this class is a 7/10.

This class was intense but the learning experience was fruitful. Dr. Rigueur is an amazing lecturer and she is always available to help/answer questions. There were weekly quizzes, homework, a midterm and a final. The quizzes and homeworks are okay if you understand the papers that the TA go over during your discussion section. The midterm was a bit of a time-crunch but it also makes sense since most of the questions are rapid-fire short answers. Even if you didn’t do well on the midterm it doesn’t mean the end of the world because you will get sufficient time to complete the final exam, which can replace your midterm if you earn a higher mark. I did not do well on the midterm due to not being able to finish but the final saved my grade. For us she kept the final open for almost a week, though it did require a lot more in-depth critical thinking and there were a lot of questions on the exam.(87 questions) So be prepared to spend a good amount of time answering and revising your responses.

Bad.

This review is mostly going to be an utterly unhinged rant, mostly motivated by a couple baffling and utterly incompetent teaching practices I've seen in my entire life. The long and short of it is, this class manages to be decent in some areas, but completely atrocious and asinine in others.

To start, I'll go over the basic structure of the class. Your grade is split into discussion attendance and participation (90 points), 2 quizzes assigned one week before exams (60 points), 6 reports (240 points), 2 midterms (310 points) and 1 final (300 points) for a total of 1000 points, with some pretty substantial extra credit peppered here and there. Your midterm 2 score can replace your midterm 1 score, same with your lowest paper score. This grading scheme is decent, it is more than fair, gives you a lot of chances to lose points and not tank your grade, and the extra credit is pretty generous. Additionally, a 92% is an A in this class, not a 93.

From here on out though, the class goes from fair and balanced, to being complete dogwater. Discussions feel utterly useless. See, TAs and the students are meant to discuss the paper and answer some basic questions on it. However, these questions are SO basic and SO barebones that you walk out of the discussion having gained nothing. This class does a great job in acting like it's teaching you on how to analyze and read a scientific paper. In reality, you most likely kind of taught yourself as you were completing the papers. The papers themselves, while relatively straightforward, have the most unclear instructions ever put to paper (or a Word document for that matter). The syllabus has it's own set of report guidelines, much of which conflicts with what is written on the instructions on the assignments themselves. Truly brilliant.

On the topic of lectures, you would think after watching her first lecture that lectures are relatively useless and that you should just read the book. This would usually work, but you eventually come to find out during the first midterm that EVERYTHING and ANYTHING said during lecture is fair game for the exams, even statements that sounds like asides. Dr. Rigueur excells and shines at being the master of using many words to say nothing at all. Is the point of a lecture well conveyed? Yes. Could it have been explained in the time it took me to urinate while writing this review? Also yes. You still can get away with not going to lecture, but do take notes on everything (watch the recording if you think you missed something).

Exams were easily the worst part of the class, not because of the content, but because of how they went about grading and releasing scores. The first midterm was a 7 day take home exam. While the questions were pretty hard, and the multiple choice was worded very particularly (almost to the point where some multiple choice felt like it depended on how you interpreted the wording of the question), I can't complain considering the length we had to complete it. The grading of the exam, however, was handled in the worst way I have ever seen in my entire life. First of all, the exam scores were available immediately after finishing (while the long answer questions weren't graded, you could see how you did on the multiple choice). This means that a lot of people saw their scores before they were supposed to. Additionally, because "Canvas glitched," much of the multiple choice was graded incorrectly, leading to way more stress than what was necessary. Worse is that the grading team doesn't seem to know what the statement, "Midterm 1 Graded" means. See, when you see a notification that says "Midterm 1 Graded," you'd think "great, my midterm is graded." So when you check and see that your score is abysmal and the grade distribution is available, you naturally think that's what your score actually is. You slowly come to terms with the fact that you got a failing score on an exam and go through the 5 stages of grief. Just as you are about to accept your grade and move on, you come to find out that your exam is not ACTUALLY fully graded, but the teaching team sent out the "Midterm 1 Graded" notification anyway. Because screw you, I guess. How the hell do you not know if a midterm is graded or not? So much unnecessary stress for no reason. When they did actually get around to grading the exam, the professor threw out a couple questions because she just flat out never went over them. Brilliant, thanks for the free points, I guess.

The second midterm was a three hour timed exam. Questions were far easier this time around, likely due to the lower time limit. These exams are open book and open note, so much of the information can be accessed if you download your notes ahead of time (don't bother trying to memorize things). They, again, left scores available so you can see how you did on the multiple choice after the midterm, but it *seems* to have been graded correctly? They took forever to grade this one too, I didn't know my midterm score until around 2-3 days before the final. The final was... whatever, not as hard as the first but not as easy as the second, considering we had 3 days to do it. There were fewer questions on the final than either midterm, meaning each question was like 0.5-1% of your grade when you consider the higher weight of the final. How fun.

As an aside, her syllabus is the first instance in which I've seen numerous errors in writing. The main bits are points that don't actually exist and extra credit opportunities that don't exist. Did these points go missing? Did the "in person quizzes" magically disappear? Did the essence comprising the concept of the "in person quizzes" suddenly dissolve into the ether, never to be perceived again by the eyes of man? Are these Schrödinger's in person quizzes? Do they both exist and not exist? If so, why is it still in the syllabus? Again, so much stress for nothing, because you read the syllabus and think that you've been missing quizzes because you don't go to lecture, only to find out that those quizzes don't even exist at all.

TL:DR. Most disorganized class on God's green earth, but you'll still *probably* get an A