I love professor Rensel. She is extremely accommodating, caring, and very engaged with the class. Her lectures were interesting and everything you need for the test is in the lectures. The readings were a bit annoying as they are long and you need to read them for the weekly quizzes. However, it does solidify the information taught in lecture. Love this class and I will take another class with her.

I took this class as a GE my senior year, and I'd highly recommend it. We learn about interesting topics like cloning, stem cells, and gene editing. Even though coming in with background knowledge (like LS 4) would be helpful, it's definitely not required and the material is accessible to a wide audience. Many of the graded portions can be easy 100s with low effort, like the weekly quizzes and discussion section. Even though participation isn't strictly required, most people still contribute and we had some good debates/discussions. The midterm and final are also very fair and straightforward. Some of the MC comes directly from reading quizzes, and the written questions are from topics we discussed at length in section. As long as you look over the learning outcomes for each lecture and don't completely disregard this class, it shouldn't be hard to get a grade you're happy with.

I'm a Human Biology and Society major, so I thoroughly enjoyed the content of this class. Other people took it as an upper div science or society GE, and I can't speak for them, but I thought the class was pretty easy. 30% of your grade is from discussion (10% attendance, 10% showing up on time, 10% participating). The discussion sections are incredibly engaging due to the format of it (lots of group discussions about controversial topics) so most people spoke every single class. Lectures itself were extremely interesting most of the time; we had a new guest lecturer for most classes, which brought interesting perspectives on everything that we're learning. Rensel herself is very caring and helpful too; I'd take another class with her if given the chance. I believe the rest of the grade is distributed by 25% midterm and 35% final, which are predominantly multiple choice with a few short answer sections based upon what we covered in class. The last 10% are weekly online quizzes on CCLE that cover lecture/book material (tbh I only skimmed a few chapters of the book and got 100% in this category) and you get multiple tries for these quizzes. You can get a great score on the exams just by attending lecture and discussion, and doing the learning outcomes that she posts after each class. Overall I'd highly recommend this course.