Dr. Amy Fluitt is an amazing professor!! By far one of the most helpful and clear professors I have ever had. She is really fun, relatable, and cool!! She really cares for each individual student and is always open to make additional office hours if you can't make hers. I had a class during her usual office hours this quarter and she created extra office hours that I could attend. No Professor has ever done that!! As for lecture, material is a bit challenging, but she really makes sure you understand a topic before moving on by constantly reviewing it and asking if there are any questions. She really makes sure to review the tricky concepts over and over, which was really helpful for me because they do appear on exams. The pace of the class is a bit fast, but that is true for all LS courses!! It was no faster than my previous ones. In order to do well in this class you should attend lecture AND go over bruincast to really solidify some of the tricky concepts. She maintains a very comfortable environment and keeps you engaged in lecture through cracking funny jokes, encouraging questions, and applying various clicker questions to keep you on point (that she does not get wrong by the way). She is really passionate about the material and thus explains concepts in a fun and intriguing manner. She always keeps class interesting and really strives to make the material as clear as possible. As for the exams, they are extremely fair. She doesn't try to trick you and she makes sure to cover material learnt in class. Exams are designed to test your understanding of the material, rather that just memorizing a bunch of nit picky stuff. Additionally, for the specific things that you do have to memorize, she will make sure to tell you that and write it on the study guide as well so there is no surprise on the exam. She takes the time to analyze student's responses and will always throw out a question if it could have been misinterpreted. She really aims to test comprehension and thus if she sees that a question doesn't do that, she will make sure it won't effect your grade! In order to do well on exams, make sure to go over clicker questions, discussion worksheets, and the study guides that she kindly provides students with. The study guides are extensive and very helpful!! Again this course is fast and challenging, but if you put in the time and effort, you can really succeed. She really loves teaching and it truly shows. I really enjoyed this course and hopefully you will too!! Highly recommend her!! Wish she taught LS4!!

TREMENDOUS curve. Believe me, no one is better at curving than Dr. Fluitt. She is the best curver this school has ever seen! Listen, folks. She will work for YOU. and YOU. and YOU! She is the best lecturer and the best curver God has ever created.

Together, we will make Life Science fun again. Together, we will make Life Science easy again. And WE WILL MAKE LIFE SCIENCE CURVED AGAIN.

On a serious note, thank God for that curve. Because ughhh I would have gotten an A- but I ended with an A+. thanks fluitt! ahhh she' such a kind lady.

How to get at least an A or A+ at least
-get at least 95% (or more!) on your free points. attend discussion, get 95% (or more!) on launchpad, and get clicker points
-tests are straightforward. i was nooooot putting in enough time studying. really just memorize her powerpoint and you will get an A. THERE IS A RIDICULOUS AMOUNT OF WORDS ON HER POWERPOINTS. MEMORIZE EVERYTHING = GUARANTEED A... fantastic...
-study guide: FORGET this. never helped. it covers things we don't need, and misses things we do need. don't rely on this. in fact, i wouldnt even look at it. focus on her pwrpnt

First of all, I saw a couple of students posting reviews on this forum at around December 5 for the Fall 2017 quarter, indicating they got As or A+s. However, such is impossible because the final exam(which is worth 24 percent of the course's total grade) wasn't even administered at that point.

I don't know why people would be motivated to post fake grades. Either way, I would take those reviews with a grain of salt.

Having taken the class and received a final grade, I personally think Dr. Fluitt is a wonderful lecturer who genuinely cares about her students. It is true that her lectures are very fast-paced and thus a little hard to follow at times. However, I think such is required given the amount of material she needs to cover. Moreover, she generally speaks in a very fluid, concise, and logical manner. As a result, if you rewind the Bruincast a couple of times, you should be able to understand everything she says.

Grade-wise, it will be tough to make an A without at least an A- average on your exams. The class average for these exams are typically at around a B-. 28 percent of the class grade, however, do come from what Dr. Fluitt called " fluff points". These fluff points compose of homework, discussion, and clicker points.

I personally find her a little intimidating during office hours. However, all in all, I think she's a great resource if you have trouble. Be sure to go to TA and LA office hours as well.

I received good grades in this class, but almost entirely through my own extensive efforts in reading the textbook and participating in discussion.
Fluitt is a horribly inefficient lecturer for the following reasons:
1. Spits out as much as information as possible in an extremely short period of time. It is physically impossible to learn 5 mechanisms with 10 catalytic proteins in the span of 4 minutes, much less take notes on everything said.
2. Poses clicker questions on the material you didn't learn 2 minutes ago. The point of clicker questions is to have you evaluate and learn, not try to regurgitate random terms you barely understood.
3. Constantly gets her own clicker questions wrong. This is ridiculous. She has to go back and review the question and reevalute her answer. Leaves students 10x more confused and degrades the amount of respect you can have for her.
4. Spends excess amount of time on certain topics, therefore leaving next to no time for other important topics. For example, we went through all the mechanisms of protein translation in about 30 minutes, but spent about 3 lectures on molecular tools.
In summary, lectures felt like a waste of time and just decreased my interest in the material. Its pretty discouraging when your notes are half empty, with just (Review!) written next to half the terms. If you lose your place in lecture, it is near impossible to keep up for the rest of the time. While you were trying to understand a term, she already moved onto 3 new ones.

Fluitt is a beautiful smart young woman! It's really not hard to get an A in the class if you study the key points she makes in her lecture slides. She also provides extra credit that factors into your homework grade. I really liked that the exams were not cumulative, so if you messed up on one of the midterms it was fine because you weren't tested on it on the next exam. Discussion is also free points; you get credit just by sitting there and signing in. Overall I'm so glad I chose to take LS 3 with Amy Fluitt. I'll miss her.

This class was an interesting experience. Fluitt is friendly, makes the class fun, and the material is interesting, but no matter how much studying I did, come time for the test and all the learning went out the window. She says that the tests aren't designed to be tricky, but they definitely feel that way; entire sets of questions around the same concept can be poorly worded, and don't expect the TAs to help because they either don't get it themselves or will refuse to say anything like monks on an oath of silence. When I later asked about the questions I got wrong and explained my thought process, they explained how it was actually supposed to be interpreted in this way and that's why I was wrong. That's what makes me angry about it. It seems like a lot of people just got what she was trying to say during the test, but I felt that the difference between 1 hour of studying and 15 hours was negligible because questions would be reliably confusing, especially on the final, which did have a nice curve. The experience was mostly good, but the tests somewhat spoiled the class.

This is arguably the hardest class in this LS series. However, Dr. Fluitt makes her tests a lot easier than other professors do. She also includes a lot of "cushion points," such as participation points for clicker questions, for doing the Launchpad readings, and for going to discussion. Nevertheless, this class was still stressful for me because there was a lot of material and she had to go through the slides really fast to get through everything on time. So it was hard to follow and I had to go back and rewatch the lectures to understand everything. Her office hours are also very helpful, as she genuinely cares about her students' learning and she would give everyone an A if she could.

Don't skip the textbook reading even if you're tempted to, the diagrams Professor Fluitt uses in her slides are the same ones as the textbook, and the figure descriptions in the book are really helpful to understand the concepts. She is very helpful during office hours, and Ann's review sessions + the LA review sessions helped a lot for explaining the concepts clearly.

It's very hard to keep up with her talking speed in lecture so that you don't miss anything, but don't worry if you don't catch everything. I never went back to bruincast the lectures, I just went through the powerpoints, readings, clicker questions, and launchpad quizzes and it was enough to do very well in the class.

This class required nothing more than her lectures. My recommendation is to watch every single lecture before every test on bruin cast, and make sure you understand everything conceptually. Her tests never ask anything more than what she has taught, and they are not tricky if you understood the material conceptually, rather than just memorization. I never read one single thing on launchpad, never went to office hours, and never read the textbook. YOU DO NOT NEED OUTSIDE MATERIAL FOR THIS CLASS. Her lectures are the sole thing that her tests are based off of. However, she is not easy to follow during class, since she talks pretty fast and academically and tbh just bored me. So I literally did not pay attention during any class. She will copy launchpad questions and discussion questions and clicker questions into her homework. I would never look at the worksheets or launchpad quizzes answers until right before the midterms. Basically everything will make sense once you watch the lecture videos (never paid attention during class or discussion) and make sure to understand everything, pausing when things don't make sense and looking at all the diagrams to understand everything. Honestly, her tests are really good. They aren't tricky, and are just like her clicker questions. They aren't simple but aren't tricky. She doesn't ever test on things she didn't cover and doesn't test on rote memorization. I did very well in this class because I took the time to understand the material, and all I really had to do was watch the videos. Started studying about 2-3 days before tests, and all I did was watch every lecture (literally learned the material for the first time right before tests), read the solutions for the discussion wkshts & launchpad quizzes, & go through all the slides to make sure everything makes sense. Very straightforward class. Good luck!

Overall, during lecture I thought that she did a great job at not only simplifying some of the complicated material, but she does a lot of concept review! I've never had a professor more approachable and compassionate about alleviating confusion. Honestly , I was dreading LS3 because of how much information I was told we had to memorize. However, the way Fluitt's class is set up, you learn enough throughout the quarter that when it comes to studying a lot of the information comes pretty easily! As long as you are an active participant in discussion and lecture (aka take notes, fill out the worksheets, try to do clickers etc.) you will have PLENTY to study from and the material should not be that foreign. Additionally, Fluitt uses learning assistants which completely changed the way I thought about pre-requisites at UCLA because their entire purpose is to help you learn and they're available at pretty much any point throughout the week via piazza or office hours. It's pretty clear that her goal is to help you learn and do well in the class, especially with all of the opportunities she gives for office hours and practice with supplementary material.