She’s a horrible person overall. She doesn’t care about her students at all and has an incredibly arrogant attitude towards teaching. If she’s not on tenure, UBC should seriously consider removing her because it’s baffling how someone like her got a job as a professor in the first place.

Professor mean girls exist

Overall this is an easy course. Textbook readings can be tedious but are essential. Exam questions are written and are often judged harshly.

Just another cell bio course!

Boring but informative lectures.

Do the practice problems.

Okay, where do I even start? As someone who's attended at least 95% of the classes, I can tell you they're practically useless. The stuff in class is literally covered in the pre-reading, and you can just go over the post-lecture slides to get the same result. What ****** me off about this class is that the exams are entirely written responses, and there's no time. The profs expect you to have an entire paragraph written for every single question, and even then, just pray you didn't miss a keyword, cuz even if you explain the entire mechanism but miss one little detail, that's a zero. Our class did terribly this year on the midterm (62 average after curving), and I literally know no one who even came close to getting an 80. The most useful stuff (practice problems) is also a joke cuz like ...read more

Well, I do find the content interesting, but the entire course design and how it's taught make it the most boring thing ever. As someone who loves biology, I never thought a course could make me dislike it so much/

She's nice and is even willing to stay past class time outside the classroom to answer the questions I have, but honestly, the most useful stuff in class is the past exam questions and how/why the student answers are good/bad. The rest of the material is the same as in the pre-reading, and nothing really new or interesting happens during lectures.

DO NOT take this course unless you have to (or unless they end up changing stuff by a lot). If you have to, don't get fooled by the easy beginning; it gets really bad after midterms. Do the practice problems, do them again, practice your writing speed, and practice getting down every single point you can think of that is even slightly related to the question clearly and as fast as possible. Do the pre-readings, get a general idea, but don't spend like 6 hours on them, and learn everything from the slides on your own time, and honestly, good luck.

I found this course to be very interesting, so I didn't mind studying, but you definitely do need to study to keep up.

Prof. Chen is a good professor. She seems to be passionate and gives lots of opportunities to go through example questions. The only issue is that the exams are written horribly. The wording is so confusing. Not only do you need to really learn the content inside and out, but you also need to re-read each question to get a decent grade.

Do not try to memorize for exams. Anything you need to memorize, you can write on the memory-aid you're allowed to bring (which doesn't help that much tbh). You will do much better if you actually fully understand the concepts being tested.

This course makes me feel like my brain is constipated. This is a bio course so there is a lot of memorization, and that is the only easy part. The exams are horrible, marked purely based off of correct wording. Its very easy to get everything wrong because even if you have the right ideas and explanation for questions, if you miss specific vocabulary you lose marks. It also seems like some TAs mark the exams harder than others, so your entire mark is just a gamble. There is also a science communication portion worth a considerable amount of the grade which seems really useless because it has nothing to do with the course content, its just a random side quest they make us do.

The content of the course is not super difficult, its just memorization. The difficult part is answering the exam questions which are all about solving paragraph-long word problems relating to experimental techniques.

Liane Chen is a very nice prof and she seems genuine. She does seem to try to teach the content and material that will be covered on exams because she puts a lot of examples of "good" and "bad" answers to possible exam questions. Although she is very nice and tries to teach, I think that it just does not help at all for the exams.

DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE IF YOU CAN. If you have to take it, then just practice the problem set questions and practice hand writing the answers really fast and just pray to god.