EE BIOL 130
Principles of Systematic Biology
Description: Lecture, three hours; discussion, two hours. Requisite: Life Sciences 1. Recommended: courses 120, 135. Concepts, principles, and methods of comparative biology as they apply to inference of evolutionary relationships among organisms. Principles and application of biological nomenclature. Letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
Most Helpful Review
Spring 2023 - The content of this class was fairly interesting and Professor Dines seems like a good guy who has some fun stories. The exams are where I felt this class fell short. There are 3 exams, 2 midterms, and a final that is non-cumulative and the same length and style as the midterms. The exams were nearly entirely memorization based (rather than application) and often included topics from class that the professor mentioned once and barely explained. I went to lectures, took good notes, and studied hard, but I still felt like crap about the final because of how unclearly it was written and how obscure some of the topics were. It felt like even with a good understanding of the topics of the class, you could never be fully prepared for the exams unless you studied every single word or example that was discussed during lectures (and sometimes weren't even on the slides). I was able to get away with decent scores on the tests by writing as much as I could about my general knowledge of the concepts even if I forgot (or had never even heard of) the specific detail that the question asked for, but it was incredibly frustrating and constantly had me worried about my grade.
Spring 2023 - The content of this class was fairly interesting and Professor Dines seems like a good guy who has some fun stories. The exams are where I felt this class fell short. There are 3 exams, 2 midterms, and a final that is non-cumulative and the same length and style as the midterms. The exams were nearly entirely memorization based (rather than application) and often included topics from class that the professor mentioned once and barely explained. I went to lectures, took good notes, and studied hard, but I still felt like crap about the final because of how unclearly it was written and how obscure some of the topics were. It felt like even with a good understanding of the topics of the class, you could never be fully prepared for the exams unless you studied every single word or example that was discussed during lectures (and sometimes weren't even on the slides). I was able to get away with decent scores on the tests by writing as much as I could about my general knowledge of the concepts even if I forgot (or had never even heard of) the specific detail that the question asked for, but it was incredibly frustrating and constantly had me worried about my grade.