Marina Cords

I took this as a requirement for the major and found it more interesting than I expected. In terms of teaching style Professor Cords is accommodating and funny. That being said she speaks too slowly for my taste but that is a personal opinion. An easy A if you are a science major but if you are not it can be a rough experience.

This course was a lot of fun. I learned a lot about primate behavior just by attending the once a week 2 hr seminars. I was very nervous about presenting for an hour, but Professor Cords helps out a lot with her insightful comments and questions. Professor Cords was very approachable and she always takes the extra step for her students. I loved this course and I recommend anyone interested in primate behavior to take this course!

Boring powerpoint lecture that is not made available to students. Annoying, but easy weekly quizzes. The class is simple, but there is much to memorize, and you need to be incredibly specific on exams. Don't waste money on the text, you will never need it. just take good notes, be able to answer all the questions on your review sheets and you will do well.

I learned SO much about primates and how they behave and interact.

All the reviews for this class and really old and/or not accurate. Marina Cords is easily one of my favorite professors. She is a fantastic lecturer and clearly cares about the topic at hand. Her powerpoints are well organized and straightforward. She cares a lot about her students and is very helpful if you bother to go to office hours or ask questions in class. She tries to make her lectures as interesting as possible and she can be very very funny sometimes, too. The discussion sections show videos that may be boring but for me that reinforced concepts very clearly and it's super helpful to reference the experiments from the videos on exams. The grading can be a bit hard but if you pay attention to what she says in class and study her material, I had no issue getting at least an A- on every exam. There is also a required zoo visit halfway through the semester and you have to make it up if you can't go with the rest of the class. I found the zoo trip not particularly helpful, but it was really fun and you get to hangout with Cords outside of class. I also had Professor Cords during an interesting time (*cough* Covid-19 *cough*), and she was very understanding of any and all difficulties that students were dealing with.

In depth about several topics in primate ecology, and a lot about science writing.

You can get a good idea about the class itself from the other reviews: decent lectures, if you like blue monkeys, all together not a horrible way to get through the science requirement, but go for Human Species if you want a really good course. The problem is that the E3B department is so diverse in terms of grad students that the TAs this semester study elephant genetics (no, I'm not kidding) and fungi or something like that. They know less about monkeys than I do, which is saying something. They tried to help, but when they're reading the stuff along with you, they can't answer any real questions, and are completely unhelpful. I talked to my friend who'd taken the class last year, and she was more helpful. Get a clue E3B: use undergrad TAs, or get a lot more grad students interested in monkey sex. You're doing a disservice to the students otherwise.

Primate diversity, behavior, and evolution.

This course has guest speakers come and share their research with students. Topics vary within the field of E3B. There were also opportunities to converse with the speakers during the speaker lunches.

After taking this class last semester, I'm surprised by how negative so many of these reviews have been. Marina Cords is a woman dedicated to her field and to this class. I found her lectures to be incredibly straightforward and clearly formatted. She readily made sure that all materials for the class were available online, and uploaded review packets before each test that were really helpful. She likes getting to know her students, so I highly recommend going to her office hours and just chatting with her. It'll probably up your grade in the class, and she might even be able to help you with research opportunities on campus. Yes, there are lots of little assignments and tests/quizzes throughout the course. However, I felt like that kept me on top of the material and also gave me lots of chances to improve my grade. I thought the trip to the zoo with the class was a fantastic learning experience, in which we were able to apply our knowledge of primate behavior to the animals in front of us. My only negative comment about the class would be that sometimes I felt like time spent in discussion sections was wasted on watching outdated scientific videos, although some of them were entertaining and educational. Overall, I would recommend this course to any student interested in animal behavior. Marina Cords is a really smart woman and knows what she's doing when she teaches this mat…