Stephen Mount

This professor has taught: BISI678C, BISI899, BSCI410, BSCI414, BSCI416, CBMG688A, CBMG688I, CBMG688P, CBMG699D

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Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 12/24/2023	He was an okay professor, but his lectures were so boring I slept most of the time.... He posts past exams and reuses some questions and/or makes new questions off of old ones, so make sure to go through those. But I feel like I did not learn a single thing this semester, it was truly a waste of my time and energy. I also was so close to an A- (2% off) so that was disappointing. Don't recommend taking him if you want to take this class.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting a B Anonymous 12/10/2023	Easily one of the smartest professors I've ever taken a class with; Dr. Mount is such a brilliant man, but he doesn't really know how to teach. He posts practice exams that are helpful but there will still always be some concept that is completely foreign on the day of the exam. There are also points for attendance, so you have to attend lectures, but he does post lecture slides that you can refer to after the lecture if you miss something while you're taking notes. One on one, he's a pretty nice guy, but he seems to have trouble understanding that the students are not as smart as he is simply due to the fact that we haven't been doing research for as long as he has. On the first day of class, he said that you have to read the textbook to pass - this is false, I did not open the book once the entire semester and I still have a B. That said, this is a complicated class with a lot of really nuanced topics, so expect to study hard.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting a C Anonymous 10/12/2022	This class is an absolute pain. Material on the exams is barely covered. Lecture is incredibly boring. I can't give any tips for success because I got a C.
Stephen Mount BSCI416 Anonymous 05/23/2022	Oh the misery. Where do I start? I was expecting this class to be fun, engaging, and not one to really impact my GPA or mental health due to the grade distribution on planetterp. Boy was I wrong. You walk into the first day of class and what happens? 20 page article to read by next class. Thereafter, you have a presentation every other week (total of 6, one where you will present and all of the others are ones where you will help make the presentation), a worksheet for each of the articles around every week, a giant grant proposal to work on throughout the semester, a mechanism report (where you will only get 2-3 weeks to work on but actually require much more time), and a final exam where you have to find answers to their long questions completely based off of articles you find on your own with no assistance. On top of that, you will not, I repeat, you will NOT get your grades back in a timely manner for anything just because they are slow graders and won't release grades for whatever unholy reason. This means you could make a mistake on your presentations one time and keep making them throughout the semester and get points docked for it because you never received your feedback in a timely manner. Some of the points you get docked on are absolutely silly and uncalled for as well. Dr. Mount will point something out in your presentation (for example not including something or saying that your figures are blurry) when in reality the presentation did not have that fault at all. He claims that he is "biased" on grading and will knock down points because of this bias when he does NOT pay attention to the presentations. I have seen him STARE at the ceiling for an extended period of time when someone was presenting when he was supposed to be grading their presentations. Someone in my class also went to his office hours and tried to have a conversation about how this class alone takes too much time and is affecting our mental health and Dr. Mount's reaction was "Well you should manage your time better." He is completely detached from the woes he inflicts on his students and that shows with his assignments, grades, and comments. Also his presentations are incredibly dull and make you want to fall asleep as well. In all, save yourself the mental and emotional strain and don't take this class (at least not with Dr. Mount) if you don't have to.
Stephen Mount Expecting an A- Anonymous 02/14/2022	Took Dr. Mount for both BSCI410 and BSCI416, in both cases he handed out a comical amount of (mostly busy) work that takes up an immense amount of time. While taking 4 other courses along with his, I often had as many assignments due for this one class in a week as I did for all my other sections COMBINED. Learning feels mostly self taught, with lectures often providing only the most basic ideas of what is going on. A study group/buddy is a must if you are in a section with Dr. Mount. Remarkably inflexible with deadlines, he will cite that the due date has been on the syllabus since day one and its on the student to plan appropriately and will refuse even a sub 24-hour extension for anything less than personal Armageddon. Assignments are almost always due at 11 pm on the due date and there IS a point penalty if you turn it in between 11 pm and 11:59 pm. Why is this? who knows! I have never seen another professor do this in my 4 years as an undergrad. Dr. Mount is irrefutably a very intelligent professor that knows his field extremely well, but has what can be best described as a pathologic blind spot for the plight of students and fails to understand that not everyone who takes a required class of his is not planning on becoming a graduate level genetics researcher. The 2 star rating (as opposed to 1) comes from him being quite friendly when you catch him at office hours or after class. Otherwise I would recommend you stay away.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting an A Anonymous 01/13/2022	I took BCHM461 the same semester as this and I thought this class was harder despite Dr.Mount handing out more A's than BCHM461. BSCI410 is very similar to BSCI222 with a bit more detail added in. Dr.Mount is literally one of the most brilliant professors I have encountered at UMD. From the very first class, you can tell by the way he talks that he knows his stuff. However, learning from him is a bit of a challenge. My friends and I joke that he just operates in the 4th dimension while you're only in the 3rd dimension. He is so brilliant and uses so much jargon it can be incredibly difficult to learn from him. At the beginning of the semester, I had a really hard time figuring out how to study for this class because his teaching was really hard to understand. Do not read the textbook, look at(and memorize) the powerpoints! I do not think Dr.Mount is a bad professor or his class is excessively difficult, but you have to kind of learn things on your own. Find a group to study together with before the exam, it'll help a lot.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting a W Anonymous 01/06/2022	The definition of incredibly smart professor with an overly rigorous course.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting an A Anonymous 11/08/2019	Stephen Mount is a mediocre at-best professor. While clearly brilliant with regards to his knowledge of genetics and biology as a whole, his poor public speaking/course design abilities severely damage his ability to teach. Content is disorganized; there is not clear architecture to what students are expected to learn and lectures take frequent roundabout tangents that are seemingly unrelated to course material. Ambiguous about grading --> literally does not communicate how he will assign grades. Gave a vague comment about how he matches exam grades to fit a certain standard deviation, but said he assigns letter grades based off how he "feels the class did as a whole". Doesn't have office hours and frequently ignores raised hands. Overall, the class is not too difficult, but teaching seems to be far outside of the abilities Stephen Mount has been given as a scientist.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting an A typicalterp 05/19/2013	I took it as a blended learning class, and it turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. There is A LOT of online material, and the in-class lectures once a week were not very helpful. Dr. Mount does not really go into the stuff that he expects us to know for the exams. I did bad on the first two exams, but still ended up with a good grade because I did well on the last exam and the final. The good thing is that he normalizes all the exams to a mean of 80 and drops the worst exam. From personal experience, Mount is understanding and nice, but he is not a very effective at explaining the material. Or maybe, this class is not suitable for blended learning since it is so technical.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting an A Anonymous 05/19/2013	Prof. Mount himself is not the world's most engaging lecturer. I had the blended learning version so I just had class one day a week and was given video lectures to watch for the other day. You can watch the lectures whenever (or never, though it's a good idea to look them over before exams). Weekly quizzes that I'd often forget to do until the day after the due date. Oops. Oh well, they're not too difficult anyway. You get a bunch of attempts so you can just brute force your way to a good grade on them. The material varies from interesting genetic lab techniques to Mendelian genetics on steroids. The latter is far less interesting and often surprisingly complex. The textbook is extremely helpful here. Advanced Genetic Analysis by Meneely is a lifesaver. The Hartwell Genetics book had its moments but I used far less frequently. Lowest of 3 exams is dropped. Each exam is curved pretty generously as well. Not a hard course, but be prepared to study a bit. Look over his old exams he posts on his website because reused questions are common. Fill out the study guides he posts on a Google doc (or print one off that's been completed and learn from that) and you'll probably be okay.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Anonymous 05/13/2013	If he teaches this as a blended learning class again, don't take it. He's not terribly difficult, but he doesn't teach at all! Lectures are rather useless, and the online lectures are poorly constructed (pauses, ums, even audible yawns). I learned more from my peers in the days before exams than from him in any format of lecture. Study guides frequently had questions that covered material that wasn't addressed in quizzes or lectures! He didn't proofread one of our exams and ended up having to add 16 points onto everyone's exam grade before curving them because the questions were impossible to answer with the given information. I don't really feel as if I learned anything new in this class that I didn't know from 222 already, just glancing information about some new genetic analysis techniques. There are a few positives: he normalizes everything to an 80%, 88% is the A-/B+ line, and he'll either drop your lowest midterm or make the exam only 20% of your final grade (as opposed to 80%). And then he normalizes again at the end of the class so you get the highest grade out of those normalizations (or so he claims). Overall, not impressed. If you actually want to learn, I hear the other professors are pretty good.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting a B Anonymous 06/08/2012	do not take this class with mount. i heard this class is much better in the fall with the other 2 professors mount is a horrible professor but getting a good grade in the class isn't too hard if you do above average and he curves a lot depending on class averages
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting an A- Anonymous 12/23/2010	Fell alseep in his class whenever he lectured. He just didn't make the material very clear and went through the material way too fast. The homeworks are doable but takes a lot of time if you don't follow what he is saying in class. his lecturing style is very boring making it hard to pay attention to. and even when i tried i couldn't understand the concepts very well. he teaches with facts instead of trying to help you understand the mechanisms... and his final was very unfair. changed the entired format compared with the previous exams...
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting an A Anonymous Terp 04/30/2008	Dr. Mount really knows his molecular genetics. The course consists of very up-to-date information, and was fascinating to learn. Grading is very fair and it's possible for lots of people to get A's. However, lectures can consist of over a 100 slides, which makes taking in the information like drinking from a fire hose. He also expects a strong background from BSCI222. Old tests are posted online, but he stresses not to go strictly by them. I suggest going to lecture, reading the book (though it is a lot), and going over the past exams. If you don't understand something on the old exams, make sure you study that concept as well as any related concept, since it's usually a slight variation from previous years that end up appearing on the exam.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/17/2007	The content of the course was disorganized in my opinion. It was really hard to group the second half of the course in a category. He does not follow the order of the chapters in the book. Mount as a teacher goes real fast in sometimes will not explain things clearly. Eventually the material gets so complicated you just tune out. Pros: He normalize all averages to 80% so one time i actually got a 70 and the average was a 66 and my grade ended up being an 84.8. An A ended up being around 83 so just be a little higher than the average. Drops the lowest exam and hw Cons: His homeworks are extremely hard. You always need to send him emails and go to his office hours just to get slightly closer to solving them. He says they are two notches higher than the hw you get from BSCI222 but its impossible. luckily he curves this impossible to 80% also.
Stephen Mount BSCI410 afollmer 10/24/2007	Not a bad teacher, strong, relevant, up to date genetics information, but he should make tapes for insomniacs - his voice will put you to sleep immediately if you forget your morning coffee. He gives you access to slides and internet information before lectures, has a crazy curve and does pretty good study guides before exams. He also posts old exams, which are very similar to current ones.