Category Archives: Course Reviews

An honest opinion on different UBC science courses!

CHEM 302: Atmospheric Environmental Chemistry

Posted on August 13, 2021 by | Leave a comment

Want to learn about the different gases in the atmosphere and how they affect the earth? CHEM 302 is a Chemistry course that discusses reactions that describe environmental phenomena such as the ozone layer, pollution, and ozone holes.

format of the course

The format of the course is pretty standard. There were live lectures with quizzes, a midterm, and a final exam. Quizzes were fairly easy with unlimited attempts for each; however, you did not get to know the correct answers till after the submission deadline. Since I took this course virtually, both the midterm and final exam were quizzes on Canvas. The midterm was straightforward and easy, as the concepts of the first half of the course were not complex at all. The final exam was pretty difficult, due to the various reaction mechanisms that you had to memorize. To supplement your studying, there were practice problem sets (not for marks) that contained difficult problems slightly above exam difficulty.

gpa 🙂 or 🙁

This is 100% a GPA booster as a lot of the content is review from 1st year Chemistry. The averages for quizzes were high 90s and for the exams they were low to mid 80s. If you put in the work this is an easy A or A+, as the class average for when I took it was 83. You can also see from the grade distribution that most people achieved an A+.

CHEM 302 Grade Distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict: to take or not to take

If you are in Chemistry and want a break in your schedule, I would definitely take this course. I had the advantage of being in Chemical Biology, thus a lot of the Chemistry concepts in this course were basically review from 1st and 2nd year. However, this course is entirely doable for life science majors, as the Chemistry concepts are super easy to follow.

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ENGL 321: English Grammar and Usage (Review)

Posted on August 4, 2021 by | Leave a comment

This course is a great arts elective, however it is most likely not what you think it is.  It is not a course that teaches strict grammatical rules vehemently challenging everyday speech and writing.  Instead, it is focused on descriptive grammar: grammatically describing English used in everyday situations.  In addition, it is a great choice for someone who does not like to attend lectures, as the whole course can be online and generally consists of readings with a couple videos.

I would recommend this course to those who are interested in understanding the rules behind everyday English use.  For most of us, English use is intuitive; no thought about sentence structure is needed.  However, if you want to understand how to make sense of our inherent intuition or you would like to be able to describe the English structure to someone learning English, this course is a great choice for you.

FORMAT OF THE COURSE

This was my first summer course, in 2020S, which took place over both summer semesters, making it more relaxed than most summer courses.  Of course, it can also be taken in the Winter Semester.  When I took it, the course grade was divided into 3 assignments/assessments over the course of 12 lessons:

  1. Journal entries (10%) – These normally consist of engaging or controversial questions such as whether there is a future tense in English.  When I took the course, these were group assignments.  Bringing friends can make it enjoyable, or you can meet interesting arts kids like I did.
  2. Exercises (10%) – These are exercises based on weekly online lessons.  I found them very useful for acquiring a conceptual understanding needed for the tests.  They are for completion.
  3. Tests (80%) – There are 3 tests: Test 1 and 2 (each 20%) are based on lessons 1-3 and 1-7, respectively.  The final exam (30%) is not worth too much more than the tests, easing the pressure of the exam.

The 12 lessons are split into 4 units, which are meant to build up your understanding of grammar.  This is done starting from words in sentences, and building up to clauses and analyzing modern-day uses of English.

GPA 🙂 OR 🙁

As long as you keep up with the lessons, you will do great (A+)!  I found the most challenging part of the course was the journal entries, but with less weight on them, there is less pressure to do well.  The exam question themes are given out beforehand and can help you narrow down your studying.

Here is the grade distribution from Winter 2020:

ENGL 321 Grade Distribution (Credits: ubcgrades.com)

VERDICT?

If you need an arts elective and would like to understand how English is built, then ENGL 321 will boost your GPA!  It is also a great choice as there are no lectures and the weight is distributed on multiple assessments.  For those who are not interested, there are many other arts electives out there, so no need to worry.  Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments below!  Enjoy the course.

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PHYS 101: Energy and Waves

Posted on August 1, 2021 by | Leave a comment

An interactive and fun course to learn about introductory physics. PHYS 101 is all about how energy and waves work!

format of the course

The lecture portion of this course is quite interactive as it consists of many i-clicker questions, group worksheets, and cool demos. There is also a lab portion of the course where you get to work with a partner apply the things you’ve learnt in class. Besides the interesting lab experiments, there are also no lab reports; however there is a time-crunching lab exam. The labs were held once every two weeks along with alternating tutorials that were also held biweekly. In the tutorials we would work in small groups of 3-4 to solve a series of challenging problems and then “teach” how we solved it to the TAs.

There is only one midterm worth 10-15%  of your grade. Both the midterm and final exam are written as two-stage exams where you first write the exam individually and then write it in a group of your own choosing. The group phase was basically the exact same exam completed as a group. The great part is that if you do worse on the group phase it would not count towards your score.

gpa 🙂 or 🙁

It’s feasible to get a good grade in the course if you enjoy the course content and enjoy math overall (no Calculus needed). Some parts where marks are easily lost are in the labs as they are quite nitpicky with the marking and formatting of the notebooks and assignments. However, there are a lot of areas where marks are basically free (participation, tutorials) to make up for this fact. The exams are super fair in terms of content, however the MC portion can be stressful as getting one wrong could cost you 6% of your mark. The average when I took this course was 72. Attached is the grade distribution form 2017W term 2:

PHYS 101 Grade Distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict: to take or not to take?

I would definitely take this course again! Being a student in life sciences doesn’t give me many opportunities to take physics-related courses. If you are in the same boat as me, this is a stress-free course to widen your scientific breadth!

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ENGL 301: Technical Writing (Review)

Posted on July 19, 2021 by | Leave a comment

If you are planning to go into Co-op, looking for an online course while in Co-op, or simply need a break from science-related courses while still furthering your career, this is the right course for you.  I believe it may be required for people in the bachelor of computer science (second degree) program, and thus would probably be a good fit for CPSC students.  It is also arts credit, yet it is meant for students in science/other faculties, so no need to feel anxious about competing with Arts majors while getting those arts credits.

ENGL 301 is all about technical writing skills, predominantly business correspondence, something that is not prevalent in science courses but is essential in applying to any job.  Thus, if you already have good technical writing skills, this course will be a breeze.  If you don’t, you will learn essential skills like drafting a resume/CV or cover letter.

FORMAT OF THE COURSE

ENGL 301 is a fully online course focused on practicing and improving technical writing skills.  The course format and due dates are laid out right away, and there are no exams.

When I took it (2020W), the course was divided into four 3-week sections:

  1. Introduction to business and technical writing, communication with instructors and classmates and building an online site.  The focus of this section is business correspondence.
  2. Report proposal, peer-review, and resume-building.  The resume is essential to creating an online networking strategy with a Linked-In profile being the key feature.
  3. Job application, report designing, and team feedback.  The highlight is the job application skills, where one can apply to a job of choice, graduate school or an international volunteer opportunity and to continue designing the report with the help of team feedback
  4. Finalizing the report, networking strategy and web folio.  At this stage, peer reviews allow for the final version of the blog, report, and all plans for social networking are completed.

Small projects may differ depending on the year/semester.  In summary, the main projects in this course are designing a web folio and a final report on some specific aspect of your life (volunteering, work, etc.) that you think may be improved by collecting data via surveys and/or interviews of stakeholders.  There were small assignments due every Tuesday and Thursday that could be completed quickly.  If you like courses with many small assignments contributing to an overall grade, this course is for you.

GPA 🙂 OR 🙁

Although there is some busy work, many examples of the projects and small assignments are available by students posting early, or web folios provided from previous years.  If you follow the instructions and textbook templates closely, you should be able to achieve A+, however with minimal work it is still an easy A.  It may help to have a group of 4 friends, or simply make new friends (as I did), as you form groups to edit each other’s work.

ENGL 301 Grade Distribution (Credit: ubcgrades.com)

VERDICT? To take or not to take

If you are interested in improving your technical writing skills for that next job, preparing for Co-op, or even know technical writing and want a laid-back course where you can build your technical writing skills, this course is for you.  If you are motivated by competition, the best final report will receive a scholarship.  Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments below.  I hope you enjoy the course!

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FRST 303: Principles of Forest Science (Review)

Posted on July 17, 2021 by | Leave a comment

Need a light and easy elective to balance out your heavy course load? Consider FRST 303, a 3-credit course that offers a glimpse of a different branch of science: forest science.

This course starts from the basics of the plant cell, so if you’re already familiar with plant biology you’re in good shape! But even if you’re not familiar with it, don’t let that discourage you from taking this course because there also isn’t too much information that you have to take in.

FORMAT OF THE COURSE

I took this course in 2020W1, and there was only a midterm and final exam. To prepare us for the closed-book exams, Chris gave us a list of potential midterm/final questions as a study guide.

Chris was a really kind professor, and he was always willing to review and resolve any confusion that students had, which made our online learning experience much better.

GPA 🙂 OR 🙁

Having all the potential exam questions beforehand helped narrow our studying for the exams, and made this course was a booster (A+)!

Check out the grade distribution below from Winter 2020:

FRST 303 Grade Distribution (Credits: ubcgrades.com)

VERDICT?

If you are looking to study a different branch of science, or simply want a GPA-boosting elective, take FRST 303! I hope you enjoy this course, and let me know if you have any questions in the comments below 🙂

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CHEM 330: Advanced Organic Chemistry

Posted on July 12, 2021 by | Leave a comment

A chance to further advance your 2nd year organic chemistry knowledge. CHEM 330 is a one of the hardest courses I’ve taken at UBC; however the nuanced content also made this an interesting organic chemistry course.

format of the course

There are lots of assessments in this course relative to your standard university course. When I took it, there were weekly problem sheets along with two huge problem sets that were all worth a substantial portion of your mark (they were quite challenging as well). Lectures were taught in a smaller lecture hall via chalk and blackboard. This means that you definitely couldn’t miss lecture as the notes would otherwise not be available online. There was also a midterm and final exam both composed of fill in the products/reagents, synthesis, and mechanism type questions. You also needed to memorize random trivia like the pKa of different organic compounds and certain bond energies.

The content was basically an extension of CHEM 213, in terms of looking at the reactions in more detail. A concept that I really enjoyed was the stereochemical control of nucleophilic addition to a carbonyl and how the stereochemistry of the alpha carbon could dictate how the nucleophile would attack the carbonyl carbon. In CHEM 213, this fact would have likely been glossed over, but in CHEM 330 we studied in-depth the mechanism behind this phenomenon.

gpa 🙂 or 🙁

This course is a massive GPA dropper and it is unclear whether there was scaling. I spent two courses worth of time studying for this course, as not only do you have to memorize a ton of reactions, you also have to learn how to use them together when faced with a synthesis problem or draw on your understanding of these reactions when confronted with a mechanism problem. I managed to get the 3rd highest midterm mark; however, this was around 91-93 which is appallingly low when the same mark in most courses wouldn’t be noteworthy of a top 3. For some reason, the professor let everyone know what the top 10 marks were, and these marks ranged all the way down to high 70s. The average for this course in 2019W was 72. The distribution is quite variable as this was a small class of 60.

CHEM 330 grade distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict: to take or not to take

While I don’t regret taking this course it’s definitely not something I would want to take again. In a way, this course helped me discover that organic chemistry wasn’t for me. If you’re super interested in organic chemistry, this course will truly test the extent of your interest.

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BIOL 140: Laboratory Investigations in Life Science

Posted on June 25, 2021 by | Leave a comment

A course that directly teaches you about the scientific method and how to practice good science! BIOL 140 is a lab course that teaches you how to collect data, set up experiments, and do introductory statistics on cool organisms!

format of the course

I took the course 3-4 years ago, so the format might have changed; however, I suspect they kept it mostly the same. Classes are run like small tutorials that occur once a week for 3 hours. These classes were very interactive and quite interesting. We’re broken down into groups of 3-4 on the first day and assigned study organisms for the term (I got the beetle). Assignments in this course were all written: literature searches, worksheets, lab reports, and paper writing. They end-goal was to design an experiment regarding our organism and doing a final write-up on our findings. Personally, we looked at whether beetles prefer a wet or dry environment by looking at the duration of time they stayed in a particular environment.

For interests sake, we set this up by filling a petri dish half with dry soil and half with wet soil. We then put the beetle at the boundary where the two soils met, and allowed 30 seconds to pass to reduce its stress levels. We then measured for 2 minutes for how long the beetle stayed at each location. We then tabulated these results, ran some statistical analyses, and then wrote up a report and presentation.

In the latter half of the course, we went to a nearby forest to learn how to identify different plant species and how to sample parts of the forest.

GPA 🙂 or 🙁

This course is not that stressful, but the marking for the written assignments and presentations are quite harsh. I remember they gave us a sample written assignment to mark on our own, and the actual mark that the sample assignment was scored was much lower than the mark my peers and I assigned. This being said, the final exam was ridiculously easy (I suspect on purpose), and the averages aren’t that bad in the end. Due to COVID-19 the latest averages are heavily inflated, thus I will provide an older distribution from when classes were in-person. The average was 77 in 2019w term 1.

BIOL 140 Grade Distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

Verdict? to take or not to take

I would take this course if you are planning on going into a life-science major as this is a prerequisite for most of them. Otherwise, this is a lot of work for a 2 credit course, and you will be exposed to a more in-depth learning of the scientific method in whatever major you choose later on.

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BIOL 364: Comparative Cardiovascular, Respiratory and Osmoregulatory Physiology

Posted on June 15, 2021 by | Leave a comment

An interesting course about the various physiological systems from a comparative point of view. BIOL 364 covers the fundamentals of the cardiovascular, respiratory, and osmoregulatory system and temperature regulation.

format of the course

BIOL 364 consists of live recorded lectures and recorded office hours! Piazza and the Zoom chat are also helpful avenues when communicating with the teaching team as they are pretty thorough with answering the questions. The mark weighting consists of two midterms and a final exam. All the questions on the exams were open-ended essay questions. Midterms were 3 questions (400-800 words each, 50 minutes) and finals were 6 questions (400-800 words each, 2.5 hours).

Unfortunately, there was much grief over the exam format as historically the exams used to be completely multiple choice. However the open format was to curb cheating as invigilation is difficult over zoom. People’s main gripe was with the subjective marking in a science course, which given the exam style is hard to minimize. I suspect things will go back to multiple choice when in-person classes begins as they are easier on the students and TAs.

GPA 🙂 or 🙁

When you’re taking the course it will feel like a GPA dropper because of the incredibly time-crunched midterms. However, with new weighting schemes implemented (dropping the worst midterm if you do well on the final exam) and the final exam being much generous in terms of time, the class average ended up being quite high and in line with the historical averages. The class average was 79.

BIOL 364 GRADE DISTRIBUTION. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict? to take or not to take

If you’re really against subjective marking and dreading getting your mark back after every exam due to not knowing how you did, I would not take this course. If you want an interesting course on physiology that isn’t incredibly in depth, I would take this course. Physiology enthusiasts should consider taking CAPS 301 which is a year-long course covering mammalian physiology.

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BIOC 302: General Biochemistry

Posted on June 2, 2021 by | Leave a comment

An interesting course where you dive into the biochemical pathways of lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids. BIOC 302 is a biochemistry course where you are assaulted with biochemical facts and information.

FORMAT OF THE COURSE

The lectures were live at 8AM…fortunately they were asynchronous and recorded due to the pandemic. Lectures were every MWF. There were also optional tutorials where the teaching assistants would go over a set of practice problems. The course was broken down into 3 broad sections. Biochemical processes and metabolic pathways of lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids and overview of DNA replication, transcription and translation. This course is super memory-heavy as you had to memorize most of the structures and names that appear in the slides as well as the complex metabolic pathways. What makes it even more difficult is that you also have to apply this memorized knowledge in different scenarios on the exams.

The assessments for this course consisted of one midterm and one final exam of equal weighting. The midterm tested the first half of the course only (lipids and proteins) while the final exam tested the latter half of the course only (nucleic acids, DNA replication, transcription, and translation). Both exams consisted of matching questions, structure recognition, multiple choice, and long answer questions adding up to 100 points.

GPA 🙂 OR 🙁

This course is very hard and you will need to put a lot of work in to be above the class average. It is imperative that you do not fall behind because then you will need to memorize more content, while trying to decipher what you are memorizing. The midterm exam was by far the hardest exam I’ve written this year (my 4th year); however, the final exam was much easier. The instructor is not shy about scaling, and usually scales the exams by 2-4% to reach an average above 70. The class average for my section was 74.

BIOC 302 Grade Distribtution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict? to take or not to take

Despite being a very hard course, I would definitely take a course if you have a strong interest in biochemistry. This course is also a prerequisite for some professional schools in healthcare like dentistry. The assessments can be tough in terms of ambiguous questions in the exams, but if you’re not too worried about that then you’re good to go!

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FRST 303: Principles of Forest Science

Posted on May 31, 2021 by | Leave a comment

A refreshing break from your traditional courses in the Faculty of Science. Although FRST 303 is still a science-based course, the focus is on the growth and evolution of trees and forests.

FORMAT OF THE COURSE

Due to the pandemic this was an online asynchronous course. Lectures were live and recorded on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The instructor, Chris Chanway, was also nice enough to schedule a 15 minute break every lecture. The entire course was graded on one midterm and one final exam. Both were of the same format: define a few words and answer a few long response questions. The exams were not invigilated and were closed book.

GPA 🙂 OR 🙁

This course might be the easiest course you could ever take at UBC, especially for science students. Half of the course content is going over basic biological concepts such as what is a cell. Having two assessments make up your entire grade may seem daunting; however, the entire question bank for both exams are provided to you a month in advance. Sadly, only 20/200 students enrolled would show up for live classes because of this. You basically don’t have to study and you can rest easy as long as you just answer all the test bank questions beforehand. I know of some people who didn’t study at all and still got an A+. In fact, the course average for my section was 94.

FRST 303 grade distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict? to take or not to take

If you have no interest in trees or forestry I wouldn’t take this course, because the material will seem very dry. If you’re looking to bump up your GPA, need upper year credits, or just looking for a small break in a heavy workload this course is definitely for you!

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