u/Due-Chemistry-3603

I am writing a rant on Reddit because I wanted to know how people felt about BIOC70 and if my feelings are mutual. This is a lengthy post about why BIOC70 taught by Melanie Ratnam was and is a nightmare course. She is a nice professor she gave us pizza at the symposium which was very kind of her, however, that doesn‘t excuse her lack of structure, organization and poor planning of this course.

i wanted to preface by saying that, the content of this course was great! I believe that there needs to be reform, bias is found in a multitude of ways within STEMM. however, I believe the structure of this course could have been better, with better assessments, more engaging discussion during tutorial such as debates, article discussions etc. instead of sitting around for an hour in tutorial doing nothing. The administration and organization of this course is solely to blame on poor planning of the professor who taught it.

now to get into the headaches or qualms about this course that are my own experience and other experiences I have heard through the grape vine.

1. The inability to use quercus. in the first 3 weeks of the course, the professor did not know how to use quercus at all. She did not know how to post lecture slides, nor use announcements, nor be able to create assignment dropboxes/submission portals for assessmenrs. Instead, she set up a public Dropbox to have work submitted which wasn’t associated to your Student number, so you had to write it on the document you were submitting. this very public Dropbox also allowed you to view other students work! your full name, student number and work submitted was fully accessible to other students!! YAYYY!! I love the lack of privacy and the ability for another student to entirely plagiarize other students work! does this violate academic integrity in any way?
2. she spent 2 weeks (4 hours) talking about syllabus! Only to change the syllabus without a class vote, change the grading schemes without announcements and not be able to provide all the assessments listed in her syllabus!
3. Inability to provide the assessments within the syllabus and changing the whole grading within the month of March. The syllabus for the course stated we would have 8 opportunities for in class assessments worth 7% of our grade, Which includes quizzes, writing pieces etc. Out of those 8 we only got 2 quizzes. The reason according to Melanie Ratnam for why we didn’t get these quizzes and assessments was due to the snowstorm (it was one day).
4. A 57% group assessment. This course has a 57% group TERM project that includes a 30 page written document, a symposium presentation and a communication (I.e, podcast, TikTok etc). We were informed that our groups would be assigned to us within the month of January so we could work on this assessment throughout the TERM. however, due to the snowstorm, we didn‘t get our groups assigned to us until the beginning of May. And, since we couldn’t get all the assessments originally, the group assessment was bumped from 57% of our grade to 65%!!!! YAYYYY!!! basically we had roughly the month of March (nearing the end of the term) to complete the entire project worth over 50% of our grade. how hard is it to use quercus to assign people into groups? at that point just allow students to form groups within tutorial! the term project could have had higher quality work!
5. The tutorials were a waste of time. I GENUINELY cannot remember anything that was done in those tutorials. We would just sit in a room looking at the projector waiting for some form of instruction, discussion etc. there was NONE! Because half the time the TA had no instruction from the professor to do anything during tutorials!!
6. For the group project, we had Check in meetings with the professor over zoom to discuss the progress within the group project. She didn’t post the zoom link for where to meet her, and when emailed, she didn’t answer. Essentially, check in’s got delayed because she had provided NO meeting link to actually discuss with her and would get upset if students were late to their meetings. I heard from a couple of groups that she would cancel the meeting if one member did not show up Which delayed progress discussion on a term project assigned in the very last month of the semester.
7. She doesn’t answer Her emails!!! Oh my god this was the worst! reaching her in person is impossible. She never answers her emails!! you MUST answer your emails you are a professor!! Students who have to reach you.
8. The course ended on March 30th, final grades were provided to us on May 3rd. a whopping 37 days later. Way past the deadline for final grades since they need to be submitted within 2 weeks of a final examination.

I feel as if this course was not the professors priority, often feeling as if the course was just a tedtalk for her. i felt as if this course and the students in this course were not a priority to her and that we just needed to “figure it out” without any guidance, planning or understanding. If u plan on taking this course. don’t!!!