Disregard the course MCDB 297. I took Dr. Merriam as LS4. Merriam is very passionate about what he teaches and he is also very kind and friendly. He is available for help at his office hours. Although he himself is a nice professor, his lectures are another different story. His lectures are irrelevant to what the exam is on. Your only best bet is discussion sections with the TA. He goes off tangent and doesn't do many practice problems. He likes to talk about figures A LOT. Thus, his exams could be tricky because you don't know what to expect sometimes. However, he let us have 1 page of notes so I guess that made up for it. He gave us 4 midterms and took best 3. As for the final, it was cumulative. He took the problems we missed from the 4 midterms as the final plus some of the new material. And it was open note as well. Overall, I think his midterm and final were fair (All multiple choice). It wasn't so bad. He also had weekly online homework (masteringgenetics). It was a good point booster, but it didn't help in the preparing for the midterms and final. There were also weekly clinic hours and small groups which you would go over practice problems. Merriam is going to retire after this class.