Be prepared for this class. Genuinely your TA is your best friend in this class as well as making friends and studying together. Professor Nagano unfortunately did not help much in this course and at the end of the quarter unfairly curved only the A- students and nobody else. The lectures were just cahoot quizzes, His online lectures you were assumed to watch them and learn from them? like multiple 45-1 hour online lectured weekly in which you cant understand him half the time even when using the transcribing tool. The quizzes aren't too bad but the material tested on for the midterms and final exam many times contained material that was never directly taught from the course and was supposed to be second hand knowledge from what you "deduced" from the material from the lecture videos. To be honest overall from this course I wouldn't want to take professor Nakano again but if you do, befriend your TA and make sure to bug them and the professor about material you might not understand. Also exams contain many mistakes purposely and are meant to confuse students.

So, I took this class the same quarter as the reviewer below and I totally agree. Literally, he/she/they hits all the main points.

Discussion: 30% (Participation 5%, Homework 25%)
So, just attending discussion section provided you full points for the 5%. Homework was questions based on research papers every week with the exception of the weeks we had midterms (so total eight homework assignments). The research papers were honestly cool like the Yamanaka paper or the hair stem cell regeneration paper, and the questions were not hard. The homework was online available all week with no time limit, so it gave you a lot of time to look over the papers and consult with others. The homework was mainly multiple choice and some short open ended.

Midterms: 30%
Final: 40%
These tests... Bruh, they were interesting. Basically, you are alotted an hour and 15 minutes to do around 58 questions. The 58 questions compromise T/F, MC, and "challenge questions". These tests were provided online through Canvas and you could drop the lower score. The thing is... an hour and 15 minutes was not enough for the challenge questions which had a block of text each time. Also, the tests were just hard since you basically needed to have all the material memorized in order to do well on the test (or make a study guide and control F.
Course Feedback: 1% Bonus

The issue with this course is that Nakano is not really good resource. The recorded slides are just his reading them word for word and the lectures are just another OH, but even those are pretty useless. I stopped going to lecture after week 2 because I was not getting anything out of it. Then, the testing material has some actual questions from things he never talked about, but they assume with his great teaching that these are conclusions you could reach based on the information provided throughout the course (but since the teaching is so bare minimum then the tests are so much application based you really arent prepared). The discussion sections are also somewhat helpful I do feel like our two TAs (Ryan and Tyler) really did try to help us by making questions that were hard enough that Nakano would approve of them while making them somewhat possible for us to do (even though they were still hard, so I can't imagine what would happen if Nakano wrote the tests).

After 10 weeks, it seems the grade cut offs changed and although I am not sure I think Nakano does not give +/- and you either get an A or B (which is nice if you are A- but bad if you are a B+). Overall, I was really stressed throughout the quarter to get an A in this class, but here are my results:
Midterm 1: 83/100 Average: 75 (Dropped) Standard Deviation: 3.7
Midterm 2: 89/100 Average: 82 Standard Deviation: 3.3
Final: 96/100 Average: 85

I think as long as you stay above the average and the first standard deviation, you should be cleared for an A in the class.

MCDB 144 with Nakano is super boring. He is using a flipped classroom approach to teach the class in which we watch his prerecorded lectures that he made during the pandemic (and now he’s too lazy to actually lecture during class time). His lecture videos are so hard to understand due to his thick Japanese accent and broken English. During actual class time, he has us do Kahoot quizzes and we also go over “practice problems.” He posts the answers to the Kahoot quizzes and practice problems, so actually going to lecture added nothing of value. I stopped going to lecture after the first week since no new material was actually covered. The way discussion section works is that we have to read mind-numbingly boring papers and complete homework on canvas beforehand. During the discussion section, we discuss the papers in small groups. The homework questions are created by the TAs and for some reason they like to ask us really difficult questions on papers we never discussed before. Nakano said that the exams would be held online, but he also said that ~25% of students got an A with him last year and ~50% got As the year before that. Based on reading Reddit, the various GroupMes, and my own experience, I would say that Amander Clark/Diana Rigueur are the best MCDB 144 teachers, followed by Austin Nakano (he is the definition of mid), who is followed by William Lowry (the worst one).