Reviews for BSCI338B

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Marjorie Reaka BSCI338B Expecting an A Anonymous 11/27/2023	She's chill. I like her style. Her lectures are boring though. The material is interesting. Exams require memorization. Questions are mostly multiple choice and T/F. Homeworks are easy. I spent maybe five days worth of work for this class.
Marjorie Reaka BSCI338B Expecting a B- Anonymous 12/13/2022	Dr. Reaka is a very knowledgeable person when it comes to this course. She could talk for hours about the topics, and more which is the issue with her teaching. She’s one of those great person, but not so great teachers. She talks on and on about other bio material not relevant to the course and go on tangents a lot. Lots of ecology based talk and evolution to know about the time periods. We would spend so much time on one single slide for 10 minutes but then breeze through a bunch of others. Towards the end of the semester she would skip parts of lectures and say “we will cover these in a later lecture”, but when we got to the later lecture she skipped it all claiming we already covered it. This was due to us being 2-3 lectures behind because of how slow paced she talks and we had to rush through 3 whole lectures in 75 minutes skipping lots of info. That being said, her exams aren’t hard, but there is WAY TOO MUCH content covered in this course to study for exams. She chooses certain topics that would be easy for the midterms, but you wouldn’t focus on them because you have so much other content to worry about. Not only that, but on midterms she claimed she would NEVER trick us. She added lots of trick questions on the second midterm by having lengthy answers which were correct except for 1 word in the end. Study hard and you can do fine, but this is not at all marine biology it is more like her marine ecology class instead. We didn’t get to any real marine bio until the last third of the class sadly.
Marjorie Reaka BSCI338B Anonymous 12/20/2009	Dr. Reaka knows the material extremely well, which means that this course covers ALL major marine animals from a billion years ago - which REALLY means that the lectures are very very dense and often contain personal diving stories. Only about 20% of the class showed up to lectures because she posted her complete slides online. Grade-wise a B isn't difficult as long as you study for the STRAIGHTFORWARD midterm and cumulative final. There was an optional paper if you wanted to raise your grade - NOT extra credit, the weight of the midterm and final were decreased so that the paper would be like a third assignment. I would highly recommend this class - probably one of the easier bio courses.