This class is very different than other engineering classes and it is heavily designed for all the pre-meds. However, the class still has lots of very very interesting information and I learned a lot about biocompatibility and the immune system. However, Professor Linsley isn't the best at telling you what you really need to know for the exams. The lectures COVER a lot of information and although he says "not to memorize" you do have to know the content very well to do good on the exams (aka memorize). The exams test deeper understanding and not just memorization but you do need to have all the terms memorized so you can give deeper explanations. This year was his second time teaching and so the exams were mostly free response and some multiple-choice questions. The main problem for this class was that since there was so much information on the slides and he never told us what are the important things we needed to know it meant that it was very easy to lose a few points here and there which resulted in lots of % drop (since the exams were only out of about 50 points, so each one point mistake was worth 2%). However, he and the TAs were nice enough to offer a small extra credit opportunity and they also graded the final exam very leniently.

We also did lose a few days of class time because of all the annoying protests so he had to cut out some stuff. The main problem for this class is the fact that he doesn't use his own slides, and rather uses the ones from the previous professor.

Overall this class is very different from other engineering classes as it isn't very computational and rather much more understanding of biology and how that incorporates into the design of biomedical devices and implants. He is a good guy but just not a very good teacher but I am hoping he will be better next year since he will have more experience.

One third about materials science, one third about blood clotting, and one third about the immune system. One of those classes that's hard not necessarily because of the material, but because of the simply odd test questions. For better or worse, almost your entire grade is made of a few tests that each have a small number of questions, so the workload is manageable but your grade is very sensitive to each mistake.

I think this class deserves credit for an especially bizarre grading policy that was implemented after people did badly on the first exam: if you score top 5 in the class for the second midterm or final, you get an A in the class automatically. That only helps the very best people in the class do even better. If you topscore on the second exam, you have no reason to touch the last third of the material, so you end up less educated than everyone else. Also the second exam was optionally online, so you could easily cheat your way into this policy. The median grade for the final was slightly below 60%, so this policy clearly did not do much to improve things. It's fine to reward people for doing well, but to see that most of the class is struggling and address that by boosting the top 10 people even higher is funny.