The reviews from 2015 are more or less accurate, but the class structure seems to have changed a bit.

The grading scheme is as follows:
Quiz 1: 30% (Week 4) (Avg = 58.3%)
Quiz 2: 30% (Week 7) (Avg = 70%)
Quiz 3: 40% (Week 10) (Avg = 66.2%)

"Over 30% of the class earned A's, 58% received B's, 13% received C's" - Wu
I got ~73% on all three quizzes and got an A-.

The quizzes are non-cumulative and are basically just a memorization game. There were around 30-35 questions and we were given 60 minutes for quizzes 1 and 2 and 90 minutes for quiz 3. This year the format was all multiple choice, except for a single calculus problem on Quiz 1. The quizzes were taken in class, but on your laptop using a Lockdown browser. Wu has a system where if you manage to get one of the top 5 scores on any one of the quizzes, then you automatically get an A. He also had an alternate grading scheme that allowed you to drop either Quiz 1 or 2, but be graded against everyone else's top 2 quizzes.
There were also recorded covid-versions of each lecture that were posted. There were also practice quizzes that were on bruinlearn (not sure if they were created by TA’s or by Wu).

Personal opinion territory:
I didn’t think this class was nearly as awful as the 2015 reviews make it out to be. It wasn't the most riveting class, but BE 100 and 110 were wayyyyyyy harder. There’s not that much conceptual thinking required in this class since the material is all just ‘facts’ being thrown at you. The main thing seems to be that there is just a lot of material and details and you have to memorize it all. I started making anki flashcards after Quiz 2, but in hindsight I should have started making them from the very start. Wu was a decent lecturer, but I stopped attending lectures after week 4 and just watched his posted lectures since I could take better notes that way.

The main topics were FDA regulations, materials science of implants, how implants and other stuff trigger immune system + immune response, and slight electrochemistry of implants.

(Continuation of Previous Review)

-I would have printed out his slides myself, but he sometimes changed them in the mornings right before class

-Some people must like him because he loves to answer questions, and some students, whether they are kiss-ups or innocent curious engineers-to-be, are just overjoyed to have such a caring professor. Well, for me, I don't care about that because: 1)I never asked a question in lecture-Google is your friend, and so are close classmates when Google/Wikipedia/Yahoo Answers/YouTube miraculously fail 2) Wu can definitely improve his slides and his teaching style, and until he does that, I will still see him as an ok professor who saved himself because of his good explanations of concepts at the end of the day

Overall probably the worst BE class I have taken so far.

The material was presented in a very uninteresting manner. A lot of the slides were useless. Most of the time, you have to take notes on what Prof Wu says in lecture but that is impossible and it is easy to miss something. This is especially problematic since there is no textbook for the class.

Pretty much had to learn the difficult subject of immunology on my own. The department should consider revamping this class. I don't think I learned any "bioengineering" here. It had some matsci in the beginning and hard core life science immunology in the end.

In real life most of this immunology stuff can be looked up. This rote memorization is not true legit engineering at all.

If I wanted to do that I would have done life sciences and there is a good chance the material would have been taught better there.

The previous review is quite outdated, so here goes:

I took this class as a sophomore, and I recommend you do the same because I heard that taking BE 176 and BE 110 Spring quarter as a junior is brutal.

Anyways, the first two weeks of this biocompatibility class deal with materials science topics, such as shear, creep, fatigue, wear, etc. The point of this is to inform students why materials (e.g., prosthetics) fail, although this material can be somewhat dry, especially if you are more invested in the molecular/cellular realms of bioengineering.

The rest of the class deals with the immune system. Now, the immune system is pretty cool, but Dr. Wu's teaching style kind of killed it for me, although I still believe it is somewhat fascinating and interesting to learn about if you have the right professor, or in my case, the TA who can probably teach better than Wu.

Even though Dr. Wu knows what he's talking about and is able to explain concepts well (you can notice this when you record his lectures, which you should do if you want to not tear your hair out in this class), here are my issues with him:

1. His style of speaking is boring and uninspired. At times, it sounds as if he is reading a bedtime story or speaking to a person one-on-one. Is it really that hard for him to amplify his voice, cut out the monotone, and have more hand gestures?

2. His SLIDES...oh boy...

-He prints out slides to hand out in class, but he has a lot of pictures in some slides, which I guess would be fine, but his printer must be crappy since the pictures come out to be bad. What makes this undesirable is that he likes explaining concepts using complicated/ low-quality pictures from journal articles and websites. I believe that students learn best through words. Seriously, compare Wu's slides to Pang's slides, and especially compare Wu's slides to Kamei's slides. Who loses in both those rounds? Wu. Although the "too many horrible pictures" problem was less significant during the immune system of the course, he copied a lot of detail-rich pictures from the Janeway textbook, some of which were overkill. Seriously, can't he just condense that info in words?

-Another major issue is that unlike Kamei (who tells you what to know for exams), Wu is not clear at all, and at times, it seems like he wants to memorize all of the concepts, which is doable if you put the time into it, but honestly, he needs to be clearer about his explanations.

For his exams, there is only one midterm (68% average, my score was a 72%) and the final (I did well enough to get an A- in the class, but there was 13 pages of writing for that test with no calculations, fortunately)

HW is 10% of your grade and is graded only for completion and effort, so I guess that is nice of him.

Although this class was not terrible and even though I do believe that the immune system is kind of cool, Dr. Wu's somewhat boring style and dense, problematic slides took out some of the fun and joy I would have had in the class had he been better, but there is always room for improvement!

Maybe BE 180 will be better in Senior year when I take that class. Stay tuned for that review.

Although the material might be interesting, I sincerely don't like the way Dr. Wu sets up the class. Bascially, he dumped all materials that he thinks might have connection with biocompatibility into the class. There is no connection between each lecture, and thus there is no building up of concepts. He also has way too many guest lecturers coming in to class. Nearly half of the lectures were taught by guest lecturers. However, it seems that the guest lecturers had no clue what the class was about, so most of them just talked about their expertise. In the end, what you got was a collection of unrelated fields of knowledge. In the exam, you would be asked to solve a medical problem relating to implant by using these seemingly unrelated information that you have somehow learned throughout the quarter.

The biggest downside for this class was that there is no final exam. Instead, we had a group final presentation on whatever medical implant we were interested in. Ideally, Dr. Wu wanted the class to use the knowledge that we have learned in the class and use it in analyzing the medical implant. However, it seemed that most people just assembled their power point slides a night before the presentation. This was because the guideline for the presentation was so vague, and that neither TA or Dr. Wu talked about the final presentation after the first week of class. What resulted in the end was, we lost two precious weeks from what is supposed to be a "core" BE class; instead we presented and listened to a bunch of presenations that I can just read off from wikipedia.

No offense here, Dr. Wu. I sincerely think that you are a good professor, and I can feel that you are really passionate about the materials. However, it seems that you are way too ideal in teaching the class.