Carol Prives

While the other reviews were negative, I don't think Carol Prives is a bad professor. She is also genuinely sweet. Maybe it's because this course on cancer is her passion so she is better at conveying the material or maybe she just stepped up her game in general. Regardless, the course is pretty straightforward, her lectures are fine and she records them which is great for reviewing the material. The material is mostly from the textbook, which is ok in its own right but I did not enjoy it very much. However, she doesn't cover all the material so just watching her lectures is fine. In terms of exams, there are two of them and a final exam. The midterms basically require you to memorize the material from lecture. The exams are really nitpicky about certain details and it is really hard to know what they are actually looking for, so my advice is just explain everything in as much detail as you think is reasonable then add some more detail. The course is fine. For the graduate version of the course, you have to attend an extra class and discuss papers. It's not very difficult.

This was her first year teaching molecular bio, so I will give her some leeway for that. And surely, Prives knows her stuff as a researcher. However, she did not do a very good job of explaining the material on her slides. Actually, it's not quite accurate to call them her slides, since she just re-used Carol Lin's slides (the prof who used to teach mol. bio) for most of the course. Since they were not her slides, she sometimes did not know the significance of one slide or another, and when they'd come up, she'd look confused and then just move on. In general, she didn't do a very great job of explaining the more complicated concepts. The big upshot was the textbook. Which was awesome, and extremely straightforward and clear (which Prives was not). I studied the book for hours, and then referenced it with her notes, and only then understood what she was trying to say in lecture. I think our TA made our tests, and it wasn't very difficult, as long as you read the book and understood it. If you tried to study from class notes alone, you might be a bit lost.

This was a recap of all your basic biology, formatted in a very disorganized fashion

The course is just two exams and a final, each worth 1/3 of your grade (or there's a seminar component for the graduate version). The grading is annoying but fine overall.

Carol Prives is without a single doubt, one of the worst, unimpassioned teachers that this University employs. Her hour and 15 minutes of slow droning lecture seemed to last forever and often made me regret being alive. I as most students in the class found our only solace in the exceptionally deep sleep that her badly organized and uninspired lectures put us into. I'm not even sure that the woman even knows what half of the things covered in her course are. Most questions during lectures were met with "umm, I don't know", or "i'm not sure about that, i'll have to check," and were never followed up. The material is not otherwise so uninteresting, but there was no clear overall structure to the course and the facts that we needed to study were often random. Her powerpoint lectures were clearly not made by her, and the slides were often filled with errors where she did make an effort to change them. Professor Prives seems to want nothing more than to not have to teach at all, and perhaps this would be better for us all. Her half of the course is followed by Manley's, whose is marginally better. He is a terrible lecturer in his own right, but at least he knows what he is talking about and has an idea of what the word "organization" means. Exams mainly asked for explanitory definitons and rarely for any kind of analytical thinking. Prives really solidified an idea in me that upper…

minimal. Optional problem sets (not very helpful). A midterm and a final.

Translational regulation and the ongoing debate around it

Basic knowledge and more recent research in DNA replication, epigenomics, RNA transcription and protein synthesis

Background of techniques used to study the central dogma, history of understanding the central dogma, exercises in experimental design.

This course provided a broad overview of the central dogma with in-depth discussion of select research (chosen by the various lecturers). It was helpful to refresh my knowledge of molecular biology and become more fluent in modern molecular techniques. This class was also unexpectedly very writing-intensive, which was a good source of practice.