Reviews for BSCI471

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Michael Cummings BSCI471 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/04/2022	This class was my favorite the semester I took it. The content is interesting and I really appreciate that it was fully remote. The semester I took it (Fall 2022) Dr. Cummings was the ONLY prof teaching a fully online BSCI class. There are too many classes in this dept that don't expect any writing from students and instead expect them to memorize the entire process of glycolysis. It was refreshing to take a class that actually wanted students to learn content. 4 hour writing assignments are nothing compared to what I had to do for CHEM241 or BSCI330. Only con of this class is that the reading assignments are really long.
Michael Cummings BSCI471 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/06/2022	Dr. Cummings for sure has the energy of an instructor that is here to do research and teaches to fulfill requirements. However, during my time in his section of 471, I found the expected effort was reasonable with my only major gripe being how the quizzes are structured. Each week a chapter is assigned and can be as long as 65 pages with material that is at times denser than uranium. All of this reading to than take a 10pt, 5 question quiz within 10 minutes that wont even touch on over 95% of your reading, its a bit frustrating. I generally found if I skimmed the start and ending of the paragraphs, took a look at the tables and pretty pictures, I would be able to survive the quizzes. From there the exams were honestly fine, he only tests on the material in his brief weekly lectures and literally spells out the learning outcomes, so as long as you do ok on the quizzes and read the slides you should be good to go. As a final note, there are weekly write ups on literature we had to do, I found they could be clicked off in a matter of 3 or 4 hours of work and for a lot of them I just did the "undergrad literature shuffle" of reading the abstract, discussion and conclusions and skimming the methods to get the gyst of how they did the study. Occasionally there will be no weekly write up with a project of a short paper (and I do mean short, sub 2 page) or making a presentation of voice over slides that takes about the same if not less time than the write ups. As a person, Dr. Cummings was nothing but kind and accommodating during my interactions with him. While in person (Zoom) communication was rare, he was quick to respond on canvas, a particular highlight was the 6 minute response time I got after sending a question at 12:30 AM. Also he would readily give points back if you had a valid reason like a question was confusing or otherwise. In summary, professional professor that was communicative and reasonable to work with.
Michael Cummings BSCI471 Anonymous 09/23/2020	Hands down the worst professor I’ve ever had in my life. He uses pre-made lecture videos which are very short and cover only a tiny fraction of the material that appears on quizzes and exams. This way he doesn’t have to actually interact with the class in any way or teach anything. Also there are no TAs and no office hours. Every week you are assigned roughly 60 or so pages of reading mostly from an extremely dense textbook filled with complicated equations. You are then supposed to retain all this material in order to take a 5 question quiz every week based on this text where you only get 1 minute per question and when you finish 1 problem, you can’t go back later and change an answer. Ridiculous. It seems he is immensely lazy and doesn’t want to actually teach the subject, which is incredibly discouraging considering this class is a very interesting subject. I have had straight A’s all the way up into my junior year but I have a strong feeling this class is going to change that. Avoid this guy at all costs
Michael Cummings BSCI471 Expecting an A- Anonymous 11/20/2018	He is the epitome of a stuck up professor. He assigns far too many assignments per week and communicates with language that feels very demeaning. He isn't mean or anything (he is pretty nice in general). Didn't like the class either: he assumed we knew way more than we actually did.