Overall, this was an ok course. Similar to most courses, it will depend on if you are actually interested in the course. Personally, i was interested, so the course itself was ok. The content is very very similar to that of the Grade 11 Biology course in high school. With some new content, mostly about ecology.

The course content was ok. Although a lot of topics were covered, it was not too bad. As someone who was kind of interested in the content, i thought it was somewhat interesting. This course involves Tutorials and a PBL project. The TA i had was pretty good, and did a good job at answering questions. But the tutorials themselves sometimes felt too long, and like a waste of time, with the post-tutorial assignments being a bit annoying. The PBL project was fine. If you get lucky and have a good group it should be ok. It wasn't too hard to get a good grade on the PBL report and presentation, but again, that was the case with a good group.

The lectures for this course were a bit boring, and felt like a waste of time, especially the second half of the course, where Kolasa would just take peerwise questions that the class makes, doesn't reword them or anything, and then copy paste them onto the test. Dushoff did a good job at making his slides very comprehensive, with different sections being in specific colours based on whether you actually had to write it down. But these lectures still got a bit boring at times. But his test questions were often more difficult and felt a bit like riddles, and were easy to get tripped up by. But he does post many practice tests with some of those questions carrying over onto the tests/assesments. Kolasa lectures directly from the textbook, and tested straight from peerwise, so before his tes...read more

For most people taking this class, it is either that you are interested in the content, or have to take it for your program and don't really have a choice. But if you put in the effort in tutorials, and regularly attend lectures to stay up to date, then you'll likely be ok. Do a whole bunch of practice tests to prepare, and ask your TAs if you have any questions or need clarification.