Selling Principles of Development Wolpert 6 edition pdf for $30. Text (925) 338-9643

Amazing professor and TAs

Lectures - majority of content on lecture slides will show up on the exams. The drawback is that there is a ton of content.

Content - I enjoyed the subject a lot and it was very interesting. It's actually heavy on genetics and seeing how gene expression controls cell diversity, leading to the complexity of development. Stem cells come up as well which is super interesting.

Discussion - Rachel was an amazing TA, but the way the discussion was set up, nobody ever really learned much from discussion. You have to read one full research paper before discussion, but the papers are often very long and complex so it wasn't possible to ever feel like you understood the paper. There's also a report due every week on each paper you read.

Professor - Dr. Rigueur offered plenty of OH and encouraged to ask questions, and she is overall very kind. Her lecture style was ok but sometimes she spoke extremely fast so laptops are good to take notes.

Midterms - Each midterm covered 5 lectures + 2-3 research papers covered in discussion. It's multiple choice, short response, and true/false. Most of the class had trouble with the multiple choice and you can lose quite a lot of points just by missing a couple. The short response has a lot of experimental questions, so it all depends on whether you understand the concepts. Average for the first midterm was around 70%, so I guess it's not that different from other MCDB classes.

Final - The final covered 8 lectures plus it was cumulative, and also covered the research papers covered in discussion....this was a lot of content. Luckily, she decided to make the final open notes/book/slides due to COVID-19. If this was not open notes, I would have 100% done very poorly. For the exams, no matter how early you study, it was really difficult to ever feel confident about the material due to the sheer volume of material.

Extra credit - she made clicker questions extra credit, so if you attend every lecture you'll get free extra credit points for just being there. she also had one extra credit question on every exam.

Tip - use OH and ask as many questions, and email the TAs with questions