I was scared to take this class with her and Campbell because of the other reviews, and I'm not going to lie, it's a tough class, but it's manageable. Tests involve a lot of memorization (were in-person), so if you're good at that, you'll be fine. Workload is low besides studying. Content can be overwhelming and tedious sometimes but it is actually pretty interesting other times (parasites are cool/freaky!). Both professors are friendly, care about your learning, and are passionate about the material. Dr. Johnson has the better, more clear, lectures. Class is curved so about 25% of students get As and majority get Bs.

DON'T TAKE THIS CLASS.

Oh, Professor Johnson. I have such mixed feelings about you. First of all, I think she's hilarious. She sort of squawks like a bird sometimes, and if you're not paying attention it will startle you out of your stupor. She also confuses herself VERY often, and will talk to herself at the podium and argue with what she's written on the slides sometimes smh. That can be irritating when you're trying to figure out what's right and what's wrong.
But she's so funny. She's one of those people who doesn't try to be funny, she's just amusing when she lectures. She's super loud and I enjoyed her lectures and her side comments. She's also pretty funny during office hours.
She assigns readings for her portion of the class (Campbell doesn't) so be aware of that. Her test questions are also kind of.... eh. She claims she doesn't like experimental questions because they're unfairly skewed towards students who are in labs vs those who aren't, but on the final there was straight up a question that was "State two possible explanations for why you discovered this and state two ways that you could prove your hypothesis right". Isn't that experimental?!?!?!
You don't have any other choices for professors for this class so it's really up to how much you are interested in Parasitology. Both profs are pretty so-so... the material is interesting but don't let this class fool you, it is more difficult than I thought it would be....

This class is okay. You don't have that many choices for MIMG electives, this one was pretty decent. It was co-taught with Campbell. Dr. Johnson is helpful in office hours and good at explaining things.
For Campbell's tests:
Memorization based. Know everything on all of the slides. Even slides that seem basic, know them.
For Johnson's tests:
Very experimental. Know how to set up and design experiments. Small details are not too important, but know all of the experimental methods.

Johnson section of the class was better than Campbell because she was more engaging and high key seemed to really care about how students were doing. She's funny lol But most of her part of the class is VERY experimental. You'll touch on a bit of things such as immunology, nuclear biology, transcriptional regulation etc. in this class and can be daunting if this is your first MIMG class. However, most of it is scratching the surface as it's in the context of parasites. There are 3 exams all worth 200 points each test is not cumulative so it's like having 3 midterms the averages were 68%, 80% and 54% for the first 2 midterms and the final respectively. With 6 quizzes given throughout the quarter that were relatively easy to get full points on with the occasional missing of one question or too. Lectures are podcasted which was a tremendous help because there is soooooooooooooooooo much information in this class. As an MIMG major this wasn't the best elective I've taken but it wasn't the worst either.

I took this class virtually in Fall 2020 with Dr. Johnson and Dr. Campbell and just for clarity I will be writing more about my experience with Dr. Campbell under his profile, although the information about the class will be the same. My tl;dr of this class would be: do not take it virtual! While the professors attempted to alter the class so that it would be more manageable virtually, I had an awful experience with their alterations and ended up not enjoying a class that should've had interesting content.

The course breakdown was brutal:
4 multiple choice tests, each covering 4 lectures (2 weeks), each worth 25 points and 25% of the final grade.
This means that every point you lost in a multiple choice question meant losing 1 point off your final grade.
And Dr. Johnson's tests were rough. The tests were roughly divided so that Dr. Johnson's material was on the first two and Dr. Campbell's were on the last two, meaning that the respective professors probably wrote the exams themselves. I just finished my final so I do not know the averages of the last test, but the first test had an average of 18.3/25 = 73.2% (later scaled and then unscaled... to being out of 25, where she gave back points to 2 questions that too many people -- fewer than 10% -- got right). The second test had an average of 14.4/25 = 57.6,% and then the professorial team ended up giving everyone 4 points back so the average was 18.4/25. The third test, by Dr. Campbell, had an average of 19.3/25 = 77% and then he added back 1 point for everyone. Note here that the trend for Dr. Johnson's tests are that they have very low averages for a class where losing 1 point on a test means losing 1 point of your final grade. If you did average on the first two tests, you already have a 86.7 (after adjustments!) in the course regardless of how you did on the other tests. I would say that the first test was okay, but the second test was a nightmare. It was riddled with typos, formatting errors, and grammar errors. I felt disrespected that she had published this without even proofreading it. Each test was available for 40 minutes and this caused me so much stress. Additionally, the professors did not publish the tests after we took them, which doesn't make much sense because I didn't know how I lost points. We could ask questions about the tests in discussion, but it was all verbal and was really confusing. I dislike that the professors didn't give us any access.

This class had not used multiple choice exams before, previously it used short answer, and while this change was made to accommodate for COVID, it definitely made this course more stressful because molecular techniques and experimental test questions do not lend themselves well to multiple choice questions.
Anyway, the original grading scheme was that <91 is a B, and the professors ended up changing the grades so that <80 was a B, which is really indicative of how low grades were on tests. They did not make this change until probably week 8, which left me and other students being very stressed about our grades for most of the quarter.

One nice thing about this class is that I took it alongside MIMG 101 and they complimented each other well. I would recommend taking them together, although MIMG 101 is a lot of work! Also, this class had very little workload. There were two pre-recorded lectures each week, and the professors chose to use the class time for a sort of office hours event where they let students ask questions about the lectures. They originally were not going to record this and were hesitant to (not sure why...big pet peeve that professors intentionally hold back information) but eventually did. There was also an optional discussion section once per week with a worksheet, also published online, about the material of the preceding week and sometimes the opportunity to go over the tests. My TA was very kind, but I asked her why some of my answers to Dr. Johnson's test were wrong and she told me she did not know, which makes me feel that there is some communication divide between Dr. Johnson and the TA team. Also, there was no textbook, which was a break from other life science classes, which I liked, although each test had a few short required (and a few optional) readings that the professors had selected.

Overall, I feel that this class has the potential to be good, but definitely was not well organized this time around. I feel that is likely a product of it being virtual, and I'm hoping that since this was the professors' first time teaching it virtually, if you take it virtually in the future, it will be a better experience.