People complaining about this man's accent are really trying to cover up the fact they didn't do as well as they wanted to purely due to their own incompetence. Pham's lectures are fast-paced, but he goes over the clicker questions very well, which are all that really matter. I never attended his office hours but every time I asked him something after class, he was nothing but kind and extremely helpful. The LS Core Curriculum have a specific way of explaining problems and he does a great job of explaining what type of knowledge is expected of us. I would go to his lectures to figure out what type of material will be tested and go to your TA's office hours instead because they offer much more personal help.

Dr.Pham is SUCH A GOOD PROFESSOR. You will be teaching a lot of the material to yourself so make sure to make use of the preclass worksheets and reading guides. These will help you focus on the important material since launchpad has soooo much to take in. Pham is a fast lecturer, but if you ask him to slow down or go over something again, he is always more than happy to do it. He also encourages questions like no other! He clearly (and I'm talking crystal clear) cares about his students :') Cellular biology can be complicated, but he will make sure you know he is there as a welcoming resource.

The flipped classroom format of this class means it relies on self-learning a lot through assigned readings/quizzes on the online textbook. Each week there are videos, textbook pages, and mini-quizzes (2-6 questions), which make up a fair amount of points (the class is out of 702 points). Staying on top of these is a must - you fall behind and it's really tough to get back on your feet. They are also super easy points that might push you from an A- to an A at the end.

The tests are quite difficult but Pham teaches you well on how to think through problems -- the questions force you to make connections with what you already know, which is why you need to stay on top of readings. There are also CLC sessions (kinda like office hours but led by Learning Assistants) that are of utmost important if you want to do well in the class. They provide worksheets that are of similar difficulty to the tests and the LAs help you walk through the problems and make connections. A lot of people who didn't do well in this class didn't go to these. They are a MUST.

Pham himself is a great guy. He makes funny jokes once in awhile and cares a LOT about his students. His accent takes a bit to get used to, but it's entirely understandable. He could be a bit more helpful when explaining clicker questions in class, but he will always expand more after class or in his office hours.

ap bio 2.0 nothing different, however if you struggled in ap bio you will struggle here too. lifesci 7 series is indeed very standardized but explanation and lecture engagement are what vary from professor to professor. pham isn't the most engaging or best at teaching imo, i've heard better explanations of the same concepts from other professors teaching the course. i lwk thought how bad could it be after reading reviews about pham's accent before going into the class, but if i'm being real honest, it would be pretty difficult to understand what he's saying at times. you have to physically sit with your discussion pod group during lecture and complete a pod assignment at each lecture which i thought wasn't very helpful, and i kinda disagree with the flipped class structure for teaching gen bio that requires both conceptual understanding and memorization of biological processes. the course is definitely structured for you to easily get that A; attend all lectures, do all your hw assignments, reading guides, discussion work, + extra credit, etc. sooo many easy points up for grabs all you need to do is lock in for aoLs. each aoL (midterm/final) had a group phase and an individual phase, which were weighted differently for each exam. make sure to get the 100 for group phase, easy points again, and review clicker questions and the group phase question format for the individual phase held during the usual lecture. also would say this is a course where you can get a lot of help from the LAs in your discussion section or at PSS workshops bc they know exactly how you will be tested on the material you learn in class basically. (not that i went to those but lmao)

I thought coming into LS7A that it would be a breeze since I took AP Bio but it wasn't quite a breeze, though I definitely had an advantage. All of the professors, TAs, and LAs definitely want you to succeed and that is evident through the accessible help on Campuswire (which I highly recommend having open throughout the quarter). Also, the class is structured to set students up for success. There is work to be done before the class (reading guides + review questions), during the class (iClicker), after the class (pod assignments), and it really helps ensure that you never fall behind. Of course there are also weekly quizzes (PALs), reflection assignments, and more, all of which contributed to a very easy time studying. Which brings me to my final compliment about the tests themselves: every exam (AoL) has a group phase and individual phase, and we were the first year where they had us take the group phase on the Monday before the individual phase (Thursday). We received our grades back for the group phase before taking the individual phase, and they were essentially identical so if you knew how to solve the group phase and understood any mistakes you made, you were basically guaranteed 100% on the individual phase.

My main criticism regarding the class and Dr. Pham is simply that sometimes lectures moved too quickly in hopes of playing catch up so that our reading guides would still be aligned with the in-class content, but this made it hard sometimes to take notes. I don't agree that Dr. Pham's accent is a problem but I do think when he speaks fast it can sometimes be difficult to decipher what is going on.

Still, I really enjoyed this class and Dr. Pham is definitely one of the best professors to take the class with. He really cares about us and is a funny guy.

P.S. Side note for people who got a 5 on AP bio in high school...apparently you can petition for it to count towards ls7a and thus skip this course. I wish I knew this before taking the class but still I met really awesome people so do with that as you will!

He was a lovely teacher!! Easy to understand and was very considerate when it came to student's difficulty in understanding the content. One time, I made a mistake on my AOL 1 of not saving my answers and my grade was really bad because of it, and he offered me a proposition that if my grade, by the end of the quarter looked really bad, he'd drop it. Very considerate teacher, I miss him lots. The coursework itself is pretty hard though, so I recommend not skipping lecture (if you can) and really pay attention and ask questions in lecture.

Very sweet professor, I found him quite wholesome. He does have a slight accent but it's not too hard to understand him. Overall class was easy to me, might be somewhat dependent on how lucky you are with groups, since the tests are group. I did find the tests relatively accurate to the material (make sure you study your clicker questions!) Workload is meh, there's quite a few things you have to do but definitely very manageable.

Because the class is majority busy work, it's pretty easy to get an A if you're with the right people and get all your homework in on time. Dr Pham himself is a super nice guy but I can't say I found his lectures very engaging. The slides lacked lots of necessary information and many of the exam questions were just testing whether or not you could decipher tricky wording, not how well you understood the content. You will probably lose some points with sneaky wording and application-based questions that were never discussed in class. Even with all that though, it is pretty easy to make up points to secure at least a 93. Dr Pham wasn't the most engaging and was pretty hard to follow at times, but he is a really nice guy and is passionate about the material.

Dr. Pham is an excellent teacher! Yes, he has a bit of an accent, but I never found myself struggling to understand him (some of the other reviews on here seem a bit exaggerated). The clicker questions serve as really good prep for the AoLs, and Pham provided good explanations for answers that didn't seem the most intuitive.

The pods are really make or break for this class. I got rather lucky with my group members (we all showed up to lecture, collaborated, seemed passionate about the subject, and even hung out outside of class) so I found myself enjoying the course, but I have heard a handful of horror stories. Even with bad group members, though, the content is generally pretty understandable so you can still succeed on your own.

I never took AP Bio in high school and was still able to receive a good grade in this course, so you can too!!

The 7A class is uniform across all lectures, no matter the professor. So, in terms of the tests, everyones being tested on the same material. My problem with the class was it seemed like you needed a pretty food background in Biology to understand the quickly paced course.

The topics change super quick, and the slides are nowhere near as in depth as they should be, so you are stuck drawing your own conclusions and having to do more work to figure out what you need to learn. I think the majority of test problems actively reflect the lecture material, but there were multiple problems where the application of knowledge seemed a step above what we learned sometimes.

My best advice: READ CAREFULLY...
They will get you with sneaky words. Don't lose easy points.

PROS:
Fun class, GREAT TA made it so good shoutout to Veronika!
Extra credit is readily available
Easy homework load