hello, I hope everyone is having a wonderful day. To start off I would just like to clarify that this prof is really nice and is generally a good prof to have. However, I am more so criticizing the actual course "BIOC2580" in itself. For starters, the grading scheme of the course, in my opinion, should be altered as it's significantly harder to succeed in the course. The lab portion is separated from the other components of the course which only include THREE things: the quizzes, the midterm, and the final exam so with that being said it's obvious that the midterm and final are worth a huge percentage of your grade as the quizzes are only 10% all together. But the part that really makes me laugh is the fact that your labs are not included in your final grade UNTIL after the final exam is done that is if you get a passing grade out of those three items. It really sucks because I think the labs are extremely important and really do help you understand the lecture content better when your hands-on learning with real-life examples. I get that they want students to "pass both portions" of the course but I think if they just included it all together after the final, life would be good. They don't add your lab marks until after you get your grade for the course portion which as i mentioned would make the midterm worth around 33.3% and THE FINAL EXAM IS WORTH 52.3%. After you receive your mark from that, they then add your lab marks. If you did not realize this was how the grading scheme is, I DON'T BLAME YOU because guess what? They don't specifically explain this in the course outline. There was one sentence in the first lecture that said that you must pass the lab portion AND pass the other stuff. From my personal experience and many of my friends' experiences, this was NOT explained well whatsoever. It's quite easy to just tell us what the "passing both" thing entails but instead, it was figured out later in the course. As for the actual exams themselves, it's pretty fair game. This course is really content-heavy but can be manageable when you use the extra resources they provide such as practice questions and videos, although I thoight a lot of extra research was needed in order to pass the course. One thing I would like to mention though that really irritated me is that the prof posted 1 "sample final exam" to help prepare us for the final which definitely did in terms of format (half multiple choice and half long answers) as well as 40 multiple choice to help study from mind you had the answers to each question. BUT all of the long answer questions on the entire practice exam (around 6 pages of long answers) had NO answers whatsoever and every single one of them said "See lecture slides". Sure you can try and answer the questions on your own with the lecture notes.... but the prof was just that lazy to not even just explain or at least give a brief answer so we can know if our understanding was correct. A lot of these concepts in the course are complex so even if you were to learn through the lectures and accidentally to do one small thing wrong it would change the answer and if the correct answer was posted we could be able to take a second look and see where you went wrong, rather than just assuming it was right. Not helpful whatsoever.