Debra Pires is an amazing professor and person! She truly cares about all of her students and expresses this any chance she gets. From her lectures you can tell she is passionate about ecology and conservation. There are iClicker questions, 75% of questions each class must be answered in order to receive credit, this counts towards your grade but only 72/782 points towards the total grade. The exams cover relatively easy information, but questions are often phrased in confusing ways. It is important to become familiar with the questions she will ask, this can be done by reviewing PEQs, practice midterms/finals, and problem-solving session questions.
Overall, I loved this course! Even though I got a B (my study habits are really bad) most people got A's. I will forever think highly of Dr. Pires!

Professor Pires is an awesome professor. She has a very maternal essence, as she often reminds us how proud she is of us, provides lovely words of encouragement, and boosts our confidence as students. She is kind-hearted, open-minded, funny, and engaging. Professor Pires truly cares about her students. She is wonderful. She is epic. She is mom.

Launchpad is the most annoying and boring thing ever. You use it for all the LS7 series, it's awful-- for that part, good luck. You can get by most of the time if you just read the highlighted/bold terms, but if it doesn't make sense then def read the chapter.

PS: I'm selling all of my notes (from both the readings and the lectures) for $15, as well as supplementary practice worksheets, so hmu on ********** if you are interested!

The class wasn't too much to handle but the exams were. Easy points when it comes to weekly quizzes, labs, and clicker questions but the exams will be difficult. Make sure to review clicker questions and attend review sessions if you want to succeed.

I had a late enrollment appointment and ended up going with Pires because her lectures was one of the last to still be open. I was a little nervous seeing the reviews on here, but after taking the class I don't understand the bad reviews. My class was online, and it ran very smoothly. She is an engaging lecturer and explained the clicker questions well. I liked that she would go over why the incorrect answers were wrong for each clicker, and this was really helpful for preparing for exams. She is good at explaining the concepts during lecture (so you can understand even if you didn't read the launchpad) and would draw diagrams to help visualize. Pires is accommodating and a really genuine person.

Always had a crab or spider video for us while we entered, lol. Clickers necessary. Tests were hard (as usual). Really sweet lady. Pretended to be our "study buddy" to help us work through examples. Would occasionally get frustrated with students but it's because they would ask something that was just explained. She really tried her best to be patient though, you could tell, I honestly don't blame her cuz I would feel the same. That's probably why you see some negative reviews about her being rude but honestly it's like 3% as extreme as they make it out to be.

Pires is a super nice lady -- really seems to enjoy the subject and truly tried to help us out and be as accommodating as possible during the pandemic, but my god, is this class boring. Maybe it's just me, but I switched my major from regular bio to MIMG so that I wouldn't have to take any more ecology and evolution after this class. I'm sure you all know about Launchpad and how tedious and overwhelming it is (USE QUIZLET), but the one part that really frustrated me about Launchpad this quarter was that there was an entire week of ridiculously long readings about different species and classes of species that didn't show up on any sort of quiz or test. I spent hours on these readings and ended up with probably over ten pages of notes just for it to be completely useless. Really frustrating.

Do not know why Deb has such low reviews but other than the class itself I really enjoyed Deb as a lecturer.

I enjoyed a lot of the content of the class, but I cannot say that I liked all of it. However, one thing that I liked throughout the class is Deb. She is one of the most well-spoken individuals and is a very clear and good lecturer. I got to know her during office hours and this is where I suggest you attend office hours because they can be very helpful. I mainly went to listen in at first but started to attend very regularly and the questions that she would work through would help out a lot.

To do well in this class is simple. Go through the learning objectives and go through the practice material that is released. Launchpad is not very helpful.

Other than that good luck!

I was nervous to take this class with Pires since her reviews are not strong, but I truly believe any faults with this class are issues with the LS7 series as a whole. Like all the other LS7 classes, the tests were poorly worded and often felt like trick questions, but Pires was always very helpful in office hours and would explain clicker/test/PEQ questions at length. Labs in this class were super easy, except 2 weeks where we had take home labs that took significantly longer than the time allotted for a discussion section.
My words of advice (for this class especially) is to attend the problem solving sessions!! for genetics and evolution, it's very easy to let one misunderstanding ruin an entire problem set on a test. The PSS were helpful for this and explained complicated topics that often showed up on exams. If you're taking this class, you're probably a bio major and have to take it anyways, but Pires is a good choice. I think she was a great professor who truly cared about her students and was always very positive and encouraging.

Class Distribution:
Midterm 1 - 120 points
Midterm 2 - 120 points
Final Exam - 200 points
Lab Section - 135 points
Clickers - 72 points
Weekly Launchpad activities - 45
Weekly pre-class review questions - 45
Weekly practice exam questions - 45
Total points possible = 782 (Graded on normal, straight scale)

LS7B was an okay class overall. It's very similar to LS7A, with the same type of clickers and launchpad assignments, the only real difference being the lab sections (which are honestly just longer discussion sections, with some of them being entirely useless). The professors were great and very accommodating, making sure they had extra office hours for exams and they were active on Campuswire too. However, the exams were poorly made, with many vague questions with confusing wording. The first midterm involves a lot of probabilities which can definitely be confusing, and the overall exams had a lot of "what if" type questions which were also confusing. Still, there was lots of extra credit given from simple surveys, midterm reflections, mini midterms (a 6 question "midterm" after the actual midterm), as well as a 1 question leeway on all the exams. Instructors also removed questions that they deemed to be unreasonable. There is no group stage for these exams. The best way to study for the exams in my opinion is to review clicker questions, practice exam questions, practice midterm questions, and going to office hours. Problem solving sessions can be helpful, but didn't really help me too much. Also, you are allowed to miss an entire week of class activities/homework and still get a 100%.

My scores: I got a 100% in all the sections except the exams. Lab sections were pretty leniently graded by my TA. Midterm 1 - 114/120; Midterm 2 - 118/120; Final Exam - 180/200; these scores include the added points from the reflection and mini midterm.

Pires herself was a solid professor who takes her time to answer everyone's questions and genuinely cares about her students, but the monotonous nature, the labs often being busy work, and poorly-made exams of the course diminish her teaching skills.