The topic of this seminar was Plant Development, so if you don't enjoy studying plants, I would really not recommend it. The class consisted of giving a solo 1 hour presentation on a paper you were assigned. Especially without having taken plant development before (I've only taken plant physiology), this class was not very fair. It was difficult to understand majority of the scientific papers without having to google everything, and googling can only get you so far. I thought it was unfair how we were expected to understand papers and then have participation be included in such a huge portion of our grade. I don't understand how anyone would be able to ask/answer questions and discuss without having a strong understanding in any of the topics. In short: plant development shouldn't even be a topic in the MCDB seminars unless MCDB C141 is a prerequisite.

The whole quarter, we weren't updated on our grades as far as what we received on our presentation or pre-presentation outline that we turned in. We received no grades for any of our assignments so you can only imagine how annoying that was, even as the class concluded. On top of that, there was no clear grading criteria such as a rubric for any of the assignments we were given, including the 1 hour presentation which was like 50% of our grade. Overall, I would not recommend this class at all. I would recommend other topics in the seminars because plant development was not very interesting, especially since much of our course backgrounds aren't in plants.