POINTS BREAKDOWN:
- 68 points for iClickers
- 90 points for midterm 1
- 120 points for midterm 2
- 72 points possible out of 80 for weekly discussion participation (so you can miss one discussion and still get full points)
- 10 points for CCLE Reflections (which I found useless, but they were easy points)
- 45 points for launchpad PCRQs
- 45 points for launchpad PEQs
- 45 points for launchpad assignments
- 200 points for final
- Extra Credit: varies by quarter I think, but for Fall 2019, there was like 5 or 6 EC points available
- TOTAL POINTS (w/out EC): 695 points

Yeah, this class is hard. This quarter, the class was taught by two professors, Maloy and Braybrook, but from what I saw Maloy teaches most of the content. Both professors were good lecturers, they had an abundance of office hours during the quarter and before tests. Lecture structure is a lot of active participation, and the iClickers are a big part of that. During lecture, there are a lot of iClicker ?'s, and you are expected to work them out with the people around you because they can be quite challenging at times. If you don't like to participate and the TA's see you, they WILL come up to you and challenge you to work out the problems with them. You're not safe anywhere, even in the back of the classroom sitting on the floor. Once, when Braybrook was lecturing, Maloy was going around and caught a bunch of us in the back not actively participating. He worked with us for the rest of the lecture, making sure we knew what was going on. While it can be annoying, especially because my lecture was at 9am and I didn't want to be doing anything at that time, it is really nice that the professors and TA's/LA's are so insistent. It makes you feel like they really care that everyone is getting the most out of their lecture time.

DO NOT DISCOUNT THE IMPORTANCE OF LECTURE. Go to all your lectures!! As you may have read/heard before, launchpad kind of sucks. It's good for background info I guess, but the professors are really going to let you know what you need to understand from launchpad. And what they talk about is what's on the tests, in excruciating and often confusing specificity. Take advantage of study sessions hosted weekly by your LA's, I never went (my bad) but I heard they were super useful for practicing how to answer the questions as they are formatted on the tests. And they're formatted wack af, so you need the practice.

Don't fall behind, try to work with others as much as you can, and by God, take advantage of the resources they give you in the form of office hours and study sessions. If I had done all these things, I probably could have gotten an A-, or a solid B if I tried a little more. This class is honestly really difficult, but it can be easier if you don't fuck around and actually focus. These professors aren't dicks, they want you to succeed. So good luck and happy studying! You can do it :)

I took LS7A with Professor Maloy and Professor Braybrook, who switched off every week. HOWEVER, LS7A is extremely standardized, with every professor teaching the exact same material in an extremely similar way. Thus, the professor you have does not matter as much as other classes.

Maloy and Braybrook are great, they have an amazing chemistry and bounce off one another very well. Maloy also brings his dog Toby to lecture every day so don't take him if you get distracted by dogs easily cough* cough*. Anyways, they teach the material really clearly and help you understand how different processes relate (very important for 7A). Their office hours are REALLY helpful, as they answer your questions and reinforce your knowledge by going over practice problems. These two professors are also unique in that they offer non-content student hours; these can be very helpful if you're new to the university. During these hours, they find a really nice area on campus and talk about things completely separate from the course, including the learning assistant program and how to find research (as well as other things). Having these two professors was a blast, and I'd recommend taking 7A with either of them.

The coursework can be pretty tough if you're new to flipped classrooms. Essentially, you have to learn the material on your own (thus professors don't matter too much), and during lecture, your professor/s will give you practice problems and help connect the dots. It is important to keep on track with the weekly readings and try your best to attend lecture, but this can be difficult with the menace known as Achieve (the textbook). If you are behind, it is not worth it to attend lecture, because the professors do not review the reading in depth.

The course and grading rubric is honestly very fair. There were 2 MCQ midterms (the first worth 12% of your grade and the second worth 16%) and an MCQ final (28% of grade). Exams are asynchronous and you are given a day to take the individual phase of the exam. The next two days is the group phase of the exam, where you will meet up with your group, share answers, come up with the correct answers, and retake the test. The group phase is the exact same test as the individual phase, meaning your group phase score will almost certainly be higher than your individual phases. These exams were not memory based, instead testing our understanding and application, and I think they did a fair job.

Finally, here are my tips for doing well in this course:
1. Understand the content and be able to explain everything.
2. If you're behind on content, skip out on your professor's lecture and attend a different professor's lecture after you've read the material.
3. Do the extra credit! This class gave out 2.8% of extra credit which doesn't seem like much but because of it I went into the final with a grade over 100% and thus took it pretty easily.
4. Don't memorize, understand. Very few questions will ask you to recite a basic fact and most of those questions will provide a diagram that has the information. The exams are about understanding and application.
5. Consider changing lecture/discussion. Put simply, you want to be in a group where you're not the smartest one so someone else can carry you. Don't be afraid to change discussions in the first couple weeks to try and roll for better teammates.
6. Don't take this class during a TA strike because the professors may or may not flake out.

Professor Braybrook is a wonderful person and decent lecturer. She is extremely funny and interesting as a person, but she sometimes stumbles a bit when it comes to teaching. She can make certain concepts unnecessarily confusing. One time she did not know something about a certain concept and had to be corrected by Professor Maloy. However, as she taught the last half of the class, she began to teach much better.

She’s a very nice person who is knowledgeable about the content she teaches in the course, but sometimes she doesn’t explain it as great as it could be explained. I took the class when she taught it with Prof Maloy and he was great. The class is flipped so you’ll have to get used to doing hw and quizzes online before lecture. The exams can be a bit tricky, so you’ll definitely need to take time to really understand the underlying concepts.

I took LS7A with Maloy and Braybrook winter 2022 (they taught the class together). There is no way anyone in my batch didn't get an A-- they made it in a way where as long as you pass, you get an A. The Launchpad assignments were super boring (every LS7 professor uses launchpad though so there's no getting away from it). Braybrook is actually a great professor though and she is very understanding. Her and Maloy are both great at both in person and online teaching (personally I even think they're better at online because when one of them talks the other answered questions in chat which was very helpful). They're cool professors! I'm selling all my notes (in-class and reading notes) for $15! Hmu at ********** if interested

As I had both Dr. Braybrook and Dr. Maloy, I will be putting this review under both of their names. (TDLR; Do all (if not extra) prep work before lecture, study learning outcomes/previous classwork, and read AOL questions carefully. Also go to office hours/CLC if you can)

Personally, I found this course's content to be similar to what I learned in AP Biology, which I took junior year. The flipped classroom format just meant that I learned everything in the textbook beforehand and then reviewed it in class. Because of this, I found the homework very time consuming, but I was making my own notes in addition to the reading guides assigned. The lectures were relatively easy to understand because I did that extra work.

Dr. Braybrook and Dr. Maloy both clearly care about their students, and they are also excellent teachers. I can't say much about how they are in a smaller group setting like office hours since I never went (lol), but I do think that they would be willing and able to answer any question. In lecture, their explanation for iClicker questions and content in general always made sense. Clicker questions are quite easy compared to the AOLs, and they aren’t graded on correctness. Discussion sections are definitely helpful, especially if you are confused on something from the lecture, so I’d highly recommend going.

Each of the three AOLs had two parts, the individual score and the group score. In the tests themselves, there were quite a few questions that would be meant to trip you up, but theoretically, you could do horribly in the individual, but still do somewhat well when you took the test with your group. However, the improvement from the group portion will definitely depend on who you're working with.

When I studied for tests, I usually started by reviewing iClicker and PALs. Afterwards, I would write out all the learning outcomes needed for the AOL, plus all the necessary concepts needed to answer that outcome. Then I would review the CLC worksheets, recorded review sessions specific to the particular AOL, and any new graphs we learned (this last part definitely helped out a lot). Going to CLC sessions and office hours (which I rarely did) throughout the quarter would probably be very beneficial, so I'd go to those as often as you can.

Grading in this class was a point system that was quite fair (mostly based on AOLs), but take advantage of extra credit so you have some buffer. Hope this was helpful, and don’t worry too much about this class if you need to take it, you’ll be just fine!

Points for Fall 2024:
Pre-class reading guides - 68
Pre-class review questions (PCRQs) - 48
Clicker questions - 64
Learning pod assignments - 30
Discussion section assignments - 72
Practice Assessments of Learning (PALs) - 45
Assessment of Learning 1 - 90
Assessment of Learning 2 - 120
Assessment of Learning 3 - 200
Reflection assignments - 10
Total Points 747

Note that the entire LS7 series is standardized, so all students taking LS7 will have the same assignments and AOLs (basically midterms/finals) even with different lecturers. LS7A is also structured in a reverse-classroom format, so you're to do preclass reading guides around the textbook before lecture where it will be more so iClicker questions. While it may help prepare you for the material, I found that the lectures may go into topics other than what the preclass reading guides ask of, and sometimes for Maloy/Braybrook lectures fall a little behind and have to be made up next class lecture.

The AOLs are also known for being very tricky, not because of the content involved, but because of the wording of the questions. You first do an individual phase on Canvas, but you can then change your answers with reasoning provided during the group phase anytime during the allocated days the test is open. Even with the ability to change answers and work with your group, the wording of questions caused a lot of debates and discussions between groupmates and beyond.

Specifically for Dr. Braybrook, I find her to be a chill but helpful instructor. In lecture, she gets us thinking critically a lot about the content, and to be honest it does help a bit for approaching the AOL tests. Dr. Maloy and Dr. Braybrook's chemistry is also amazing, and they work well with each other in class. I recommend going to office hours (it'll be the same time as Dr. Maloy's, they switch off between each other) and problem-solving sessions for more clarification on tricky concepts or if you need more practice (hint: you should really get as much practice as you can from the course, especially for the AOLs).

A large part of your grade in this class comes from doing assignments on different websites. Make sure you are frequently checking when every assignment on every website is due, as I lost a lot of easy points due to the complexity of the grading system.

I took Dr. B in a course where Dr. Maloy also taught. They kind of did a switch off on who was leading 3/4 of the way through the course. Dr. B was really nice. She was open to joking around once in a while, and I liked the dynamic that she and Dr. Maloy had.

The class isn't super easy, but it isn't wildly hard either. There were launchpad assignemts due every tuesday and Thursday in the morning. Lots of reading. I didn't do alot of it, which could be why I got a C+. Their lectures are engaging enough, they allow for questions, we had learning pod groups where we're supposed to collaborate with them at the end of the class on an assignment. The assignment isn't for points, it's just for learning. The midterms and final were a multiple choice test you'd do by yourself and then you'd go over that test with a group of students and you'd discuss what the answers were. If you realized one of your answers was wrong, you'd write why the answer was wrong and what the correct answer was. That really helpful for my grade
.

The course itself is a class you have to keep paying attention to. You have to give it at least your 80% attention to get a good grade. Read the assigned readings, pay attention in class.

Discussion wasn't attendance mandatory, but you should go cause you go over the right answer during discussion. Furthermore, I would suggest making a friend for those weeks where you have take home discussions.

Dr. Maloy and Braybook make a good pair. Their personalities complement each other and overall makes the class more interesting. She is very kind and easy going. I get the feeling she genuinely cares about her students and their understanding of the material. Sometimes I think she can benefit from being more concise and giving direct answers. Overall, highly recommend.