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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting a C Anonymous 11/09/2025 |
Dr. Rankin is super sweet and clearly very knowledgeable, but she teaches the class like we’re PhD students. The amount of depth she goes into is honestly ridiculous for an intro-level course - the class is insanely hard. For some people, this is their very first bio class - as a Biology lover, I feel bad for them because this is their first impression of biology, as it feels like we’re being thrown into a graduate-level course. Our first midterm? 40 questions in 45 minutes. Some of them required calculations — no calculator allowed. Every question was multiple choice, but not the normal kind where you can guess or eliminate answers. Nope. Each question had like 5–8 options, sometimes including “2 of the above,” “3 of the above,” and “all of the above”… all in the same question. The class average was somewhere between 30–40%. And guess what — she refuses to curve because she “doesn’t believe in curving.” She’s clearly from a different era of education, and while her experience is impressive, she really needs to understand that those old-school methods just don’t work for today’s students or the way we learn now. After our first exam, she said she was “disappointed” with the test scores and offered to let us retake the exact same test. When people raised their hands to explain why we struggled — like how we didn’t have enough practice problems or how some questions clearly needed calculators — she literally cut everyone off and said, “I’m not asking for your critiques right now, I just need a yes or no for the retake.” Her lectures are brutal. Three times a week, she stands in front of a screen and reads straight from her PowerPoint. Each lecture has its own deck — anywhere from 50 to 100 slides — and every slide is just a wall of text in size 12 font. She also uploads extra videos of herself talking outside of lecture, plus textbook PowerPoints that are another 25+ pages each. On top of that, she made us pay for two external tools outside our school: SimBio – about $90, with 3 assignments per week that each take 1.5–2 hours. They’re fine, but completely useless for the exams because the questions are way easier. PointSolutions – aroundt $30 AND NOT MENTIONS IN REQUIRED COURSE MATERIALS, where she asks 1 or 2 random questions during lecture (sometimes none at all), and we have to respond through the app. It’s graded, so if you miss a class, and/or get the question(s) wrong, you lose points. After the first midterm, even the students who used to sit up front realized there was no point in paying attention. Now everyone just sits in the back and takes their own notes because listening to her read slides does nothing. Again, Dr. Rankin is a very nice person, and very knowledgeable, but the way this class is structured is just not it... |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting a C Anonymous 11/01/2025 |
I want to start by saying that Dr. Rankin really is very nice. It's clear that all of the decisions she makes regarding the class are in an attempt to help students succeed, and she is VERY knowledgeable/passionate about the subject she is teaching. That being said, everything about this class stressed me out from beginning to end. The homework for this class was interesting, and I learned a lot from it, but it rarely helped at all with what you would see in the exams later on. She would also give practice quizzes, which were helpful in the sense that you would see what her exam style would be like, but they still didn't really help all that much. The only way I can describe the actual exams is hell on Earth. If Lucifer himself were to wake up one day and say, "Hey ^w^ I'm going to make an exam for these damned souls," they would look like the ones we took in this class. In fact, the whole class did so poorly on the first exam that she actually decided that she would let us retake it two days later, without changing the questions at all, because the average was like 40-50%. I learned after the first time that the only way to do well on the exams in this class is to take notes on every last slide in the presentations (50-80 slides each + many of the slides are just walls of text in size 12 font) and memorize, memorize, memorize as much as you can and then pray. I took BSCI170 last semester without having taken a biology or chemistry class since my freshman/sophomore year of high school, and I barely struggled at all in that class compared to what I have dealt with in this class thus far. I feel bad saying all of this because again, Dr. Rankin is so nice and so incredibly intelligent, but I have yet to meet anyone in my class of 100+ people that have said her teaching style works for them. It feels like 30 years have been taken off my life. |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting a C- Anonymous 05/24/2023 |
Professor Rankin is super nice and caring. She genuinely wants her students to succeed and she'll help you out if you're struggling. Other than that her class was not well put together. The homework each week wasn't consistent, there were a lot of them, they were pretty easy, but they seemed to be due on random days. I missed some homework assignments because I couldn't get into the flow of the work, so I'd check the homework page and suddenly there was an assignment due Monday that I missed because it wasn't there a few days ago. Her exams were also really hard. They were mostly multiple choice, with some short answer response questions. And they were still hard. People who guessed on every question could get a similar score (and not a good one) to people who took the notes and studied. The first exam went so poorly for the class as a collective, we got a complete do over. Her lectures were also really dry and I found it a real struggle to pay attention. The only thing that saved my grade from a D is the fact that she dropped the lowest exam score and curved (?) the other exams slightly. |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/21/2023 |
Dr. Rankin is extremely knowledgeable. She is also kind, caring, and has her student’s best interests at heart. However, her lecturing was not too engaging and her test writing was unreasonable for a 100 level course. Class consisted of only lectures, which was mostly her reading off very dense slides. Occasionally, she would include her personal experience from her research, which I found really interesting. Most of the class skipped her lectures since they were dry, but I think it was valuable to go, since she would briefly mention something that would show up on exams. Every now and then she would become enthusiastic about certain species and she would become animated. Honestly, I wish her lectures consisted of her describing her research on various species. Her exams were very difficult. Not only were the questions wordy and difficult to interpret, they frequently had answer choices of A, B, C, D. Two of the above, E. All of the above. Her exams were also given online in Lockdown Browser, so it was impossible to annotate the questions while taking the exam. She did allow for a notecard on Exam II, Exam III, and the Final. (Unfortunately, the averages for Exam I, II, and the Final were all still failing.) However, she offered a total 35 points of extra credit on exams, so that was really helpful! Homework was given through the online textbook. There was a lot of it and it was not useful. It took 3 hours a week in addition to reading the textbook. Keeping ahead of the textbook reading was key. Yes, it was a lot of work, but it was necessary since it was difficult to absorb the content from the lectures. Overall, Dr. Rankin is really a nice person. She wanted us to do well, but she just wasn’t used to teaching a 100 level course. The content for this course was extraordinarily interesting and that motivated me to read the textbook. It was also neat seeing how the content we learned in class was applicable to her real world experiments. If you’re trying to get into the Biology LEP, I would recommend taking an easier (safer?) professor, but if you want to push yourself and hear about the research application of BSCI160 info, Dr. Rankin is super cool. |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 05/15/2023 |
Class content is interesting, Dr. Rankin is clearly passionate about the subject. However the exams are extremely difficult especially for a 100-level class (averages in the range of 40-60% and no curve) |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting a B- Anonymous 05/11/2023 |
Dr. Rankin is one of the most sweetest and kindest professor I have so far. However, I believe that she has this expectation of student that they should already know what she's talking about. I did great on the third exam because I read ALL The chapters in the textbook and attended her lectures thrice. I might have done better if I attended her lectures. So in summary, if you're gonna take her class, be sure to read the textbook and take notes while you're at it AND attend her lectures with full consciousness because her voice is very soft so its very relaxing in a sense (or it makes you sleepy) and I think you'll be good to go. |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting a C Anonymous 05/08/2023 |
Don't get me wrong, she is hella qualified in this field, but because of this she makes the course much harder than it should be. Lectures are dense and read off of slides (the times where she does stray off the slides is to go in depth about a species that is interesting but useless for us to memorize), exams are so advance, I had a TA tell me how the format of the exams/ questions are ones she sees in her upper level courses. That being said, we are her first time teaching this course so she didn't know how to dumb it down for us. Also, because we were the first ones, we got an entire retake on Exam I (same exam, questions and answers, and you got the average taken between the two as your final score), and a cheat sheet for Exam II. She is so sweet and caring, but I would hesitate to take her unless you are confident in your test taking skills... |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting a B Anonymous 05/03/2023 |
Do not take this professor, even if it's the only section available. Class is ridiculously boring, the posted slides aren't the same as the ones she shows in class since they're missing some slides or are in the wrong order. The slides are also just walls of text, so it takes a long time to find information. Exams are impossible, some questions were about content that was never talked about in class. Questions take a long time to read and understand, as do the answer choices, so time is a real threat. Multiple-choice questions have options like "two of the above" so even if you understand the topic and pick one of the right choices, the whole question is wrong. The third midterm is 3 days before the final. The only thing this class has going for it is that she allows 2 attempts on quizzes, but the quizzes are just as hard as the exams. |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI160 Expecting a B+ Anonymous 04/11/2023 |
Exams required heavy studying of material and lecture slides were very dense. I stressed more about her class than I did for Orgo 2. |
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Mary Ann Rankin
BSCI338N Expecting a B+ Anonymous 11/21/2022 |
I want to start off by saying that Dr. Rankin is an extremely nice and caring person. That being said she is just not a good lecturer. The material is dense, but not as dense as her slides. Class is extremely boring. The weekly quizzes are extremely difficult but you are given two chances to complete it so after getting a 4/15 on the first attempt you can spend an hour trying to decipher her questions and go through her powerpoints to find the minute detail she is asking. You will have 15 minutes to complete 15 multiple choice questions, which are not straight forward nor easy. Her tests while also online are just as difficult and annoying. I took this class as a Biology elective and it may have been the single worst decision of my life. This is the worst class in Maryland. Do not take Dr. Rankin, unless you want to be constantly frustrated and receive a poor grade. |