I loved LS4. I never thought much of genetics, but after this class I have a better appreciation of it. Pham is a really sweet professor and I really enjoyed having him. Lectures were engaging, and although he did have an accent, he wasn't too difficult to understand.

For me, there was definitely a learning curve I had to get over for this class. A week before the first midterm, I panicked and cried because I didn't understand anything at all and thought I was going to bomb the test. By the time the second midterm rolled around, I did three of his practice tests the day before and managed a perfect. It's a little tough at first, but once you learn how to think with a "genetics mindset" you'll find that Pham's class is actually quite easy.

Pham really wants to help you do well. He encourages you to ask questions and is very, very transparent about his exams. He posts a TON of past exams and as long as you do and understand them (I suggest that you focus on the more recent ones) you should be fine. The second midterm is the easiest if you stay caught up. The final is probably just a tad more difficult than the first midterm. I'm not sure if he curves because his averages seem pretty high.

Flipped classroom format is helpful, albeit a bit tedious. You get quizzed on the videos but he lets you drop a lot. Discussion quizzes are meant to be easy points, and so are clickers. Pham also assigns textbook questions that aren't graded, and I mean you can do those if you want... but I didn't touch them even once throughout the entire quarter. My main study tool was the practice exams.

Overall LS4 with Pham was a great class. Didn't stress me out too much. Enjoyable. Loved it.

Hello anxious pre-meds/health students, I'm here to give a very honest and straightforward review of this class, the professor, and how to succeed.
Class: This class is not very conceptual. There are conceptual things that you should know but majority of this class tests your aptitude in math, probability, and applying simple genetic concepts (i.e probabilities of passing certain genes/diseases on a pedigree) into a mathematical equation to find the answer. With that said, I would highly recommend actually understanding why you use certain numbers and equations rather than just memorizing "how to do them" because then you will be able to apply it broadly to any exam question. As for lectures...I never took notes because 1) he rarely (basically never) tests you on vocab or concepts/facts 2) I couldn't understand his accent.
Professor: He's a cute guy and very nice. He likes phrases like "very good" "thank you for asking that question". His accent though. It takes a while to get used to it but it's not unbearable.
Discussion: So this class has quizzes based off textbook problems. Your best bet is to do those problems because the quiz will typically be verbatim from your textbook so you should always get a 100. If you're lazy like me, you can gamble and eliminate long problems because no TA is going to want to grade 20 quizzes of a question that was extremely long/difficult and tedious. TAs are just as lazy so it'a win-win for both
Exams: Okay so a lot of these reviews say "do all the exams!!!". No. you really only need to do about ~3 years worth of exams. For example, I took this class in 2017 therefore I did all the exams that were labeled with 2017,2016,2015...maybe some 2014 just for extra practice. This was suffice to get solid As on all the midterm/final exams as the questions were literally exactly the same just different wording/numbers. His exams are very fair and he literally gives you practice exams and answers. Just do the work, figure out how he gets the answers, and you're solid. It's extremely straightforward, no trick questions. Word of warning: His exams are "easy" but also unforgiving. Make a few careless mistakes here and there and you'll see your grade tank off stupid mistakes. Triple check your work please! I've seen many of my friends who said the exam was easy only to find they made a handful of careless mistakes which tanked their grade from a potential 95/100 to 80/100

I would say stray away from just memorizing patterns and how to answer his questions as you're severely limiting your knowledge in genetics as well as the understanding of why you are doing certain things to get to the correct answer. With that said, don't make this class harder than it is. All the material is right there, work smart, focus on the practice exams not the lecture slides or every word he says. There are many classes where you can pack in tons of hours and still do bad. This class is not one of those. If you work hard and practice, there's no reason to fail. Good luck bruins

Pham was such a cute, straightforward, honest professor. He made learning genetics really fun, and I didn't lose my attention as much during his lectures. This class was more like a stats/probability math class than a Life Science course (i.e. LS1/2/3). I would say memorization helps, but you need to know how to apply the "formulas" to the different genetic math problems. In short, just consider this class to be another math class than another biology class.

Compared to the other LS classes, this class was definitely easier and thus more enjoyable for me. Pham assigns you problems from each chapter, and I would say that they are worth solving because 1) it gives you more practice for the exams and 2) the TAs use these problems for the discussions section quizzes (literally word-to-word from the text).

The best source for this class is the past midterms, which Professor Pham provides himself on CCLE. Solve those problems, know what you don't know, and attend office hours a few days before the exams because other students are probably having trouble with the same exam questions as you and will ask them during his office hours. Understand the questions you got wrong on the practice tests and review some more, and you will be fine for his midterms and final.

Pham is such a sweet, approachable professor. I would definitely recommend this class for anyone who is taking LS4.

This man cares alot. For the first midterm I thought he was really clear since it was all math. The second midterm I could not for the love of my life understand him during lecture. For the final he was a bit more clear. Basically, most of my learning were straight from his past exams he loaded up on ccle. He loads up about 20 or so of his tests but you really only need to do about the past 7 because those are the ones that are most similar to the test he will give. If there is a certain concept you realize you don't understand as well as you go through his midterms, then go through every test and look for that specific question until you find a pattern. That reminds me, before I took this class someone told me you can kind of bs your way through it. And that is true, you can definitely do that easily by finding patterns and not really needing to necessarily know the details of the concepts as well as say LS 2 or 3. There isn't nearly as much memorization in his class compared to the other LS classes. The in lab discussion quizzes were easy just go through all his problems he assign and the TAs PROBABLY will take a question verbatim from it. The pre lab quizzes weren't too bad just take it with a friend because everyone has the exact same 4 questions. So what I did to study for the midterm was his past midterms->understand HIS clicker questions from his lectures because he pull some of them verbatim or nearly verbatim on his tests->skim the rest of HIS slides->go through the pre lecture clickers and pre lecture quizzes (they weren't the most helpful but they help to solidify some concepts so it's better than nothing)->go through the past midterms again. It's not really necessary to study the rest of his pre lecture slides for his tests but it doesn't hurt to go through it once or twice. In fact, I didn't even bother watching the videos. But it doesn't hurt to watch them. For the final, everyone gets so terrified that he only uploads the past 2 finals but honestly if you study with other people and understand EVERY single question on those two finals and his 3 practice set of questions his final is arguably more or less difficult as his midterms.

Pham is really sweet and caring but his exams are hard and relate very little to lectures. Don't waste time practicing the clicker questions, just figure out how to do his past exams because he essentially just repeats them every time. Also your discussion quizzes will not necessarily be from the book like he promises, every TA does it differently. Recommend getting Chegg study for solutions to problems in this class.

He cares about you learning, but there is a disconnect between the lectures and the actual midterm. All you need to do to get an A in this class is practice the problems from the past midterms and finals that he makes available to everyone in the class. It was a very interesting class and made me very interesting in the field of genetics.

Because LS4 is phasing out, I'll use this review to talk more about Professor Pham than the class. As you probably read in other reviews, he does have a thick accent, but you can still understand what he is saying. It's a challenge but it's not impossible. If you really have trouble though, remember that TAs are there to help you as well. Overall, he tries really hard to help students and cares about his students succeeding. This past quarter, I've been to his office hours where he solves problems specifically requested by students until they understand the content. However, when it gets closer to exam time and he is running out of time to deliver all of the material, he can get a little frantic and jump around all over the place instead of fixating on a single topic. This can be frustrating especially when you need clear guidance, but again, turn to your other resources: TAs, friends, notes, etc.

LS 4 is phasing out, but from the description of LS 107, they should be very, very similar. Here's some of my background and a guide to doing well, as someone who got an A+.

Preface: not really having had a bio background before starting the LS 1-4 series, I have to say that LS 2 and 3 were difficult for me, unlike most students here. Breezed through LS 1, did decently in LS 2, got pretty wrecked by LS 3 (mainly because of how questions were asked).

I got to LS 4 and I FINALLY felt super comfortable -- and anyone should be able to do well by remaining calm and thinking things through. This class is so, so methodical, with a lot of simple statistics / probability and basic math. There are definitely nuances, but do not let them get to you!

Pham posts old exams and makes his new ones very similar to his old ones. But you can't go completely off rote memorization of answers to certain types of problems - unless you can also back it up with memorizing the set-up/wording of the question. That is actually about half of what I did, though I also ended up connecting it back to my theoretical knowledge. I'll definitely say that's probably the quickest way to learn IF you're someone who can learn by looking at answers, understanding what happened, and working backwards.

Even if you aren't, I suggest doing this to guide your studying, because with how many old exams he has, you won't be losing out too much by giving up the experience of working through a couple problems. I imagine how he teaches LS 107 shouldn't change too much. So once again, pay careful attention to wording, connect that back to theoretical concepts, and then view answers. If his answer keys are too vague which admittedly they often are, go directly to where he problem-solves in class and listen to his explanation.

When test days start rolling around, be able to balance between going straight through a full exam, and then narrowing your focus to very specific types of problems. If you're shaky on certain things, you do not want to keep just "hoping" you'll get better at it based off the experience of just one practice exam, or hoping you get one specific version of a problem because that's not true mastery.

This is what I mean by going through different exams and reading the different set-ups of the same basic problem and how they lead to different answers. You'll learn a lot and be able to build up a lot of speed/efficiency by practicing the same type of problem. It helps with the psychological aspect of test-taking as well, realizing that focusing on one thing at a time will very concretely produce results. Again, you'll need to balance between breadth and depth to maximize efficiency; unless you start super early in terms of studying you should NOT just do one or the other.

As for me, I only ever started reviewing/studying 2-4 days before the exam because I always had physics and chem exams during the same day/week. But hey, here was my grade breakdown:

Clicker attendance: 30/30
Online quizzes (drop 4 out of 16): 30/30
Discussion quizzes (drop 2 out of 10): 40/40
Midterm 1: 99/100
Midterm 2: 100/100
Final: 187/200 (93.5%)
Total: 486/500 (97.2%) = A+

It's genuinely not that hard to become an expert at each type of problem, especially if you work with friends who are often better at one type of thing or another. I was good at only 60-80% of the exam content for midterm 1, 2, and post midterm 2 material, but was able to become competent at basically everything by sharing/exchanging knowledge among friends.

The tools are essentially all there for you in this class! There are definitely some rare caveats that will take some sleuthing to figure out sometimes, unfortunately, but that's what TAs and LAs are for. One example that I can think of is choosing the most number of exconjugant in circle problems; there are special cases for these.

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So I took this class with 14 other units, this is LS 107 BTW. I didn't put much effort into studying so I got a C. But basically its a flip classroom, where you watch videos at home and do online quizzes and you go into lecture and do clicker questions. His exams are based on old exams which he provides you with. They are the same exact questions as old exams so just study old exams and you will get an A.