~SELLING THE ISLAND OF DR MOREAU EMAIL *************~

Professor Landecker and this course were not overly challenging at all. I'm not premed and got higher than a 93% on both the midterm and the final. Participation also counts for 20% of your grade, and there's a weekly assignment that has to be turned in each week. Also, there are pop in class assignments to make sure you go to lecture since they're podcasted, giving you an easy 10% pass credit. I'm a little annoyed at the end of class, since there was one paper that brought my grade down to an A- when I got a 95% on everything else, and it appears my TA graded much harder than most other TAs, but overall the grading was lenient and nothing on tests was out of nowhere. It isn't a bad GE at all, and a very interesting class for pre HBS majors. Section was mainly lecture review, so could sometimes be a little bland, but at least it paid off on tests. Landecker is very passionate and knowledgeable about the subject, but she could often talk monotonously which could make listening difficult after multiple other lectures. Overall, I would take it again and didn't find it too challenging in the least.

The other review for this particular quarter (Fall 2016) is unfair; while Landecker may not be the most engaging professor, she is extremely well versed in the material and wants to see students succeed. Lectures are BruinCasted, slides are posted online, and there is no textbook; instead, students have to read about ~4 articles per week and do a very short (less than one page) assignment regarding TWO of the articles per week. Your grade will be determined mostly by your TA, as they grade these assignments, the midterm/final, and the one essay that is required of you. The grading scheme is actually rounded out fairly nicely by large percentages attributed to participation in discussion, alongside a few (very short) participatory assignments that Landecker passes out every once and a while to encourage attendance in lecture. I also took Soc Gen 89 (the honors seminar for the course) and highly recommend; Landecker's 1-on-1 interactions are inquisitive and much more charismatic than the large lecture allows for. I am a more of a science-heavy student, so I actually wished we focused MORE on the biology-based material (we rarely discussed the biological causation/explanations of the material in-depth; rather, we focused a lot on their actual implications and this often spun the conversation in-lecture towards more societal narratives. Just another reason I disagree with the other review). The exam questions CAN be misleading, I admit, but they are not so impossible to navigate that you will fail the exams; review what she SAYS in lecture rather than the lecture slides themselves and the rest will follow (this is made easy by the BruinCasts). All-in-all, this class is not all-that-difficult to succeed in - it's up to you to put in a decent amount of work and not just blow this class off as an easy GE. I'd definitely take this class - with this professor - again.

I've tried so hard to stay awake in this class, but I immediately fall asleep once Landecker starts talking. Her voice is very unenthusiastic, so potentially interesting topics sounded extremely boring during lectures. The course is supposed to be about both human biology and society, but the focus seems to be mostly on biology. The exams are hard because she includes small biological details that we didn't know we were supposed to study. The questions are also really tricky, where you think two answers are technically right, but one is slightly "more correct" than the other. This professor pretty much ruined Human Biology and Society for me, but I hear that the class with Lynch-Alfaro is really great compared to this one.