POINTS BREAKDOWN:
- 68 points for iClickers
- 90 points for midterm 1
- 120 points for midterm 2
- 72 points possible out of 80 for weekly discussion participation (so you can miss one discussion and still get full points)
- 10 points for CCLE Reflections (which I found useless, but they were easy points)
- 45 points for launchpad PCRQs
- 45 points for launchpad PEQs
- 45 points for launchpad assignments
- 200 points for final
- Extra Credit: varies by quarter I think, but for Fall 2019, there was like 5 or 6 EC points available
- TOTAL POINTS (w/out EC): 695 points

Yeah, this class is hard. This quarter, the class was taught by two professors, Maloy and Braybrook, but from what I saw Maloy teaches most of the content. Both professors were good lecturers, they had an abundance of office hours during the quarter and before tests. Lecture structure is a lot of active participation, and the iClickers are a big part of that. During lecture, there are a lot of iClicker ?'s, and you are expected to work them out with the people around you because they can be quite challenging at times. If you don't like to participate and the TA's see you, they WILL come up to you and challenge you to work out the problems with them. You're not safe anywhere, even in the back of the classroom sitting on the floor. Once, when Braybrook was lecturing, Maloy was going around and caught a bunch of us in the back not actively participating. He worked with us for the rest of the lecture, making sure we knew what was going on. While it can be annoying, especially because my lecture was at 9am and I didn't want to be doing anything at that time, it is really nice that the professors and TA's/LA's are so insistent. It makes you feel like they really care that everyone is getting the most out of their lecture time.

DO NOT DISCOUNT THE IMPORTANCE OF LECTURE. Go to all your lectures!! As you may have read/heard before, launchpad kind of sucks. It's good for background info I guess, but the professors are really going to let you know what you need to understand from launchpad. And what they talk about is what's on the tests, in excruciating and often confusing specificity. Take advantage of study sessions hosted weekly by your LA's, I never went (my bad) but I heard they were super useful for practicing how to answer the questions as they are formatted on the tests. And they're formatted wack af, so you need the practice.

Don't fall behind, try to work with others as much as you can, and by God, take advantage of the resources they give you in the form of office hours and study sessions. If I had done all these things, I probably could have gotten an A-, or a solid B if I tried a little more. This class is honestly really difficult, but it can be easier if you don't fuck around and actually focus. These professors aren't dicks, they want you to succeed. So good luck and happy studying! You can do it :)

I took LS7A with Professor Maloy and Professor Braybrook, who switched off every week. HOWEVER, LS7A is extremely standardized, with every professor teaching the exact same material in an extremely similar way. Thus, the professor you have does not matter as much as other classes.

Maloy and Braybrook are great, they have an amazing chemistry and bounce off one another very well. Maloy also brings his dog Toby to lecture every day so don't take him if you get distracted by dogs easily cough* cough*. Anyways, they teach the material really clearly and help you understand how different processes relate (very important for 7A). Their office hours are REALLY helpful, as they answer your questions and reinforce your knowledge by going over practice problems. These two professors are also unique in that they offer non-content student hours; these can be very helpful if you're new to the university. During these hours, they find a really nice area on campus and talk about things completely separate from the course, including the learning assistant program and how to find research (as well as other things). Having these two professors was a blast, and I'd recommend taking 7A with either of them.

The coursework can be pretty tough if you're new to flipped classrooms. Essentially, you have to learn the material on your own (thus professors don't matter too much), and during lecture, your professor/s will give you practice problems and help connect the dots. It is important to keep on track with the weekly readings and try your best to attend lecture, but this can be difficult with the menace known as Achieve (the textbook). If you are behind, it is not worth it to attend lecture, because the professors do not review the reading in depth.

The course and grading rubric is honestly very fair. There were 2 MCQ midterms (the first worth 12% of your grade and the second worth 16%) and an MCQ final (28% of grade). Exams are asynchronous and you are given a day to take the individual phase of the exam. The next two days is the group phase of the exam, where you will meet up with your group, share answers, come up with the correct answers, and retake the test. The group phase is the exact same test as the individual phase, meaning your group phase score will almost certainly be higher than your individual phases. These exams were not memory based, instead testing our understanding and application, and I think they did a fair job.

Finally, here are my tips for doing well in this course:
1. Understand the content and be able to explain everything.
2. If you're behind on content, skip out on your professor's lecture and attend a different professor's lecture after you've read the material.
3. Do the extra credit! This class gave out 2.8% of extra credit which doesn't seem like much but because of it I went into the final with a grade over 100% and thus took it pretty easily.
4. Don't memorize, understand. Very few questions will ask you to recite a basic fact and most of those questions will provide a diagram that has the information. The exams are about understanding and application.
5. Consider changing lecture/discussion. Put simply, you want to be in a group where you're not the smartest one so someone else can carry you. Don't be afraid to change discussions in the first couple weeks to try and roll for better teammates.
6. Don't take this class during a TA strike because the professors may or may not flake out.

I took LS7A with Maloy and Braybrook winter 2022 (they taught the class together). There is no way anyone in my batch didn't get an A-- they made it in a way where as long as you pass, you get an A. The Launchpad assignments were super boring (every LS7 professor uses launchpad though so there's no getting away from it). Braybrook is actually a great professor though and she is very understanding. Her and Maloy are both great at both in person and online teaching (personally I even think they're better at online because when one of them talks the other answered questions in chat which was very helpful). They're cool professors! I'm selling all my notes (in-class and reading notes) for $15! Hmu at ********** if interested

Professor Braybrook is a wonderful person and decent lecturer. She is extremely funny and interesting as a person, but she sometimes stumbles a bit when it comes to teaching. She can make certain concepts unnecessarily confusing. One time she did not know something about a certain concept and had to be corrected by Professor Maloy. However, as she taught the last half of the class, she began to teach much better.

She’s a very nice person who is knowledgeable about the content she teaches in the course, but sometimes she doesn’t explain it as great as it could be explained. I took the class when she taught it with Prof Maloy and he was great. The class is flipped so you’ll have to get used to doing hw and quizzes online before lecture. The exams can be a bit tricky, so you’ll definitely need to take time to really understand the underlying concepts.

I think I can get that each of the activities is aimed to make us understand more about the course, but I really think the inverted structure falls short. The pre-class reading guides and learning pod assignments often covered things that are talked about next lecture and without the lecture information would be hard to do by ourselves.

Lecturers are good but I don't like the way this course is structured. Don't like the flipped classroom format because lectures feel too slow but all learning is done outside of the classroom.

The posting of the lecture slides and learning goals was the most helpful. The practice PALs were also great practice for the AOLs.

The professor that you pick for the LS7 series doesn’t matter in terms of difficulty, but they definitely matter in terms of engagement and how likely it is you’ll turn up to lecture. I found Professor Maloy and Professor Braybrook to be engaging, so I tried not to skip lectures (I also had a really good learning pod that I sat with, which definitely helped). The assignments were really easy for this class, but the exams were much more difficult. The first two AoLs were manageable, but the final was unreasonably difficult. The professors also didn’t really reply on Campuswire when students had concerns with the final. Honestly, the professors kind of gave off fake woke vibes with how much they emphasized student mental health but then ignored everybody for a week… but they were still okay I guess.

As I had both Dr. Braybrook and Dr. Maloy, I will be putting this review under both of their names. (TDLR; Do all (if not extra) prep work before lecture, study learning outcomes/previous classwork, and read AOL questions carefully. Also go to office hours/CLC if you can)

Personally, I found this course's content to be similar to what I learned in AP Biology, which I took junior year. The flipped classroom format just meant that I learned everything in the textbook beforehand and then reviewed it in class. Because of this, I found the homework very time consuming, but I was making my own notes in addition to the reading guides assigned. The lectures were relatively easy to understand because I did that extra work.

Dr. Braybrook and Dr. Maloy both clearly care about their students, and they are also excellent teachers. I can't say much about how they are in a smaller group setting like office hours since I never went (lol), but I do think that they would be willing and able to answer any question. In lecture, their explanation for iClicker questions and content in general always made sense. Clicker questions are quite easy compared to the AOLs, and they aren’t graded on correctness. Discussion sections are definitely helpful, especially if you are confused on something from the lecture, so I’d highly recommend going.

Each of the three AOLs had two parts, the individual score and the group score. In the tests themselves, there were quite a few questions that would be meant to trip you up, but theoretically, you could do horribly in the individual, but still do somewhat well when you took the test with your group. However, the improvement from the group portion will definitely depend on who you're working with.

When I studied for tests, I usually started by reviewing iClicker and PALs. Afterwards, I would write out all the learning outcomes needed for the AOL, plus all the necessary concepts needed to answer that outcome. Then I would review the CLC worksheets, recorded review sessions specific to the particular AOL, and any new graphs we learned (this last part definitely helped out a lot). Going to CLC sessions and office hours (which I rarely did) throughout the quarter would probably be very beneficial, so I'd go to those as often as you can.

Grading in this class was a point system that was quite fair (mostly based on AOLs), but take advantage of extra credit so you have some buffer. Hope this was helpful, and don’t worry too much about this class if you need to take it, you’ll be just fine!