A lot of these past reviews are pretty weird, vague, and unhelpful, so I'll try to provide one that will help students in the future who are planning to take this class. This class consists of weekly quizzes every Wednesday except week 1, week 6 (week of the midterm), and week 8 (the week of thanksgiving) (yes, that means there is one during week 10), discussion, midterm, and a final.

Lecture: It's twice a week, not podcasted, and there are no clickers.

Weekly Quizzes-40 points: These quizzes tested you on the most recent 2 or 3 lectures every Wednesday at the end of lecture. The difficulty will vary on who your TA is, since they make the quizzes. Each quiz is worth 10 points and my TA, Ethan, usually ended up putting one difficult or tricky question that was worth 2 points, and the rest were pretty fair. However, he often put one extra credit question worth one point and you could potentially get 11/10, which can really help your grade. Since there were 7 quizzes in total, we were able to drop our 3 lowest quiz scores, which was pretty generous.

Discussion-60 points: You sign up with a group for one week to present a scientific paper with a powerpoint presentation and the group is expected to present for around 30 minutes usually more or less. Although it sounds pretty daunting, it's really not too bad especially when you split up the work. Also, you're also expected to participate by asking a question after the presenters are done talking. That is to say the professor never explained exactly how she would grade us, but I feel like she gave mostly everyone full score if you tried to participate a few times.

Midterm-100 points: It consists of defining some basic terms, compare and contrasting, and matching. Certainly, the matching portion was by far the hardest part. Memorize ANY chemical compound that she emphasized in class along with ANY symbiosis structure between the microbes and the plant, or just about anything she talked about in class. Besides the matching part, which was pretty cruel, the midterm was fair I guess and the TA had a review session during discussion before the midterm trying to emphasize important concepts, which helped me with some of the questions on the midterm.

Final-150 points: Hirsch is nice enough to make the final open note every time she teaches. In other words, you are free to print out all the slides. Even more, she lets you use your laptop, which you can download all your powerpoint slides on. You just can't use wifi at all. Even though the final asked some very specific questions such as a gene or enzyme that was mentioned only once out of a 1000 slides, if you studied and knew the slides, the final was very fair and I thought it was better than the midterm.

To this end, I really hated LS 1 (ecology and evolution) and thought it was so boring and unengaging, but I definitely thought this class more interesting, particularly the second half of the class when she started talking about the pathways about how microbes such as agrobacteria, fungi, nematodes, etc. infect the plant. Furthermore, I though Professor Hirsch was a very nice lady and she was very passionate lecturing about stuff that I would've otherwise thought would've been boring. To put it another way, this class is very doable if you put in the work, it's less content than MCDB 138, but maybe more than 165A...just make sure you recognize as many pictures on her slides as possible of things she emphasized in class.

Friend is freaking out, so i thought i would help. Know the section headers for important slides and main points. Slides were text is c and p by professor and not her own are not important. Just know the basics like 5 steps, what impt gene or hormone does and you will get an A at min, gluck tomorrow.. accepted to harvard med danno

Reply to comment below: "useless lab technique" ? Are you serious? And you complained about presentation? It was f*king free points!

It's true that the papers do not appear on exams, so what? Shouldn't you be happy about having less material to study?
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At first, I really hated Dr.Hirsch because she goes over stuff REALLY FAST (that why many people record her lectures, including me). But after the midterm I started to like her because it was EASY! Average was about 80 & 10 pt easy extra credit so basically avg was about 90.

It was much easier than I thought because the material on the slides contains a lot of detail...but she only tested us on the basics....

Final was open note and THANKS GOODNESS it was open note, you can even use your laptop!!! you can practically find all the answers using spotlight in mac....

I'm shocked by the positive reviews professor Hirsch has on bruinwalk, but none of them are for this course (MCDB 150). The discussion section is a complete waste of your time: students are made to present scientific journal articles in nauseating detail to a room full of half awake peers. The content of these articles has little if anything to do with lecture material, and it never appears on exams. Professor Hirsch has nothing better to do than sit in on these student presentations and grill the presenting pair with graduate level questions about the paper to determine if the student really understands the pointless lab techniques. Not one minute of the discussion (for the entire quarter) was invested in reviewing lecture material, going over the previous week's quiz, or discussing the midterm/final. In lecture, Hirsch failed 50% of the time at getting her lecture started on time due to her inability to operate her own laptop, use powerpoint, and connect to the classroom presentation system. She is a dull lecturer. She seems to thrill herself by keeping the main points of each lecture obscured. Don't expect her to clearly state what she wants you to know. I took this class for GE and wish I didn't. Avoid.