BIOL 3410

Overall, this class was very easy. The course grade was comprised of 5 exams (60%), online weekly quizzes (8%), short online assignments (7%) and the laboratory (25%). The lab was comprised of four lab practicals (two small [5%], two long [10%]), lab exit tickets (5%) and post-lab quizzes (5%).

The lectures were helpful in this course, but went at a slower pace than was necessary. At the beginning of the semester, a decent portion of the material covered in lecture was review from previous biology classes I have taken. We used Top Hat during class which was fairly helpful in understanding the depth of knowledge that was expected of us and how questions on the exam might have been formatted. Top Hat was not worth purchasing for this course, however. I mostly answered these questions in my head or in my notebook. Prof. Massey posed open-ended questions to the class which encouraged participation. She also allowed students to ask questions during lecture and make announcements at the beginning of class if they wished. Prof. Massey was always very kind and enjoyed interacting with students, which I appreciate. The exams in this course were too easy, and may not have effectively assessed students' understanding of the material.

Unfortunately, the laboratory section of this class was not conducive to learning which was frustrating. In almost all of our labs, we worked through an online document that was best completed through a lot of copying and pasting from the online textbook or through searching for images online. Periodically, we were given lab practicals on the material, which we had to know very in-depth. It would have been more helpful to me to spend 30 minutes a week studying what we would be tested on rather than doing lab assignments. I think the laboratory section needs to be restructured. At the moment, it does not serve its purpose effectively. TA demonstrations, discussions led by the TA, dissections, and hands-on activities would aid learning and understanding better.

Dr. Massey was new to UVA this semester, which was very apparent during her course. Her lectures are kind of all over the place and the slides she posts don't usually fully match the ones she presents. Lab is a ton of memorization of information you have to teach yourself. Massey is nice enough, but her class was not very enjoyable. She definitely knows what she is talking about, but I think she could do better at communicating it. Her exams aren't too bad but there are a lot of them (5 lecture exams and a cumulative final), you do get to drop one though. Exams are closed note, in person, on paper with a bubble sheet. I think this class could just be organized much better. Labs were relatively easy but the checkpoints and practicals hardly related to the activities you do in lab so you have to work very hard to teach yourself all you need to know for the lab quizzes/exams. #tCFfall2021

If you are looking to actually learn Anatomy don't take this course. You have to teach the material yourself as lab all you actually do is work on a work document to label random structures, which most often you can't find in the textbook or online. There are weekly quizzes for lab as well that test you on the structures you learned that week. Then there are checkpoint practicals and longer pracitcals in lab that test your knowledge on the structures, they are quite difficult and if you don't spend a lot of time teaching the material to yourself you won't do well. The lab is really a waste of time and worth too much of your grade in the course to not actually learn anything.

In regards to the actually lecture, it is incredibly boring and the short videos she posted online are much better at actually teaching the physiology. You aren't taught any in anatomy in lecture. However, the tests in the class are fair and straightforward.

Lectures really don't help at all, but overall the class isn't entirely horrible. You can watch her YouTube videos that she makes instead of going to class (she tends to go off on tangents in class, but her videos cut all that out!). The exams aren't ridiculously hard, but they are sometimes annoying. She also posts exam "blueprints" which lay out what topics are gonna be on the exam and how many questions of each. She also has a list of learning objects that is really helpful to figure out what to focus on. Again, her lectures don't help that much but the textbook is amazing!!

There are 5 exams in her class plus a final. The final is optional and can replace your lowest midterm grade which is nice. There are also weekly quizzes (but only your top 8 quizzes count, and there's more than 11 quizzes throughout the semester). There are also connect assignments, but only your top 7 count (I think you can drop like 3?). Overall not a horrible class, but hopefully she improves for A&P 2.

#tCFfall2021

It is so bad. I wanna give it a zero. But that's not possible. So I give it a one.

Lab is really, really rough.

I'd like to preface this by saying that it was Massey's first time teaching at UVA, so hopefully, she learned some things from this semester and carries on to make the future classes better.

The grade breakdown for the class is 5x Exams (60%) + Lab (25%) + Connect and Weekly HW Quizzes (15%). The 6th Exam is an optional cumulative final that can replace one of the earlier exams. There are numerous random extra credit opportunities dispersed around the semester too (which is very uncharacteristic of the biology department). The Lab lags behind lecture by about a week, so be ready to come into the lab with no clue about anything you're doing. In addition, there are assessments in the lab that diagrams are not provided for, so make sure to get the latest lab in the week that you can. I had a Monday lab and she would often see how badly we did and review in lecture the next day, so it was pretty unfair tbh. The class itself is INCREDIBLY disorganized and I've never seen a professor with more technological issues. Not only does she not provide diagrams in labs to memorize for the assessments, but she also never includes the pictures and diagrams in the posted lecture slides. You never get feedback for anything, so get ready to just guess what you got incorrect and try to mess it up again.

Despite all of this, this class is extremely easy. The exams are subjectively not hard and require no deeper thinking than base-level biology and maybe skimming over the textbook before the exam (You're forced to buy it). Highly recommend making your own notes by combining the word docs and the PowerPoint that she posts because sometimes Massey doesn't carry everything over to each document. Labs are decent as long as you get an okay TA (Connor was great!) -- never stayed the full time. The class in general is a huge hodge-podge of random assignments, but the difficulty is pretty rock-bottom, especially if you've taken some version of an A/P class before.

This class was awful. To go in more detail:

Lecture: Massey's lectures were very straightforward and easy to understand, but difficult to sit through. If you read the textbook, you legitimately don't need to go to her lecture - after the third test I stopped going to lecture because I would just purposefully dissociate while there, and my grade didn't go down at all taking the last lecture exam based off of textbook info only. Her syllabus said tophat was required (so I bought it, and so did a lot of others) before she backtracked and said it was optional, so there goes a full 2 weeks' worth of grocery $$. Speaking of her syllabus, the required textbook readings not only don't match in page numbers but also in section headings, making it hard to guess what you need to read for each lecture bc the old textbook info was used, & when we asked if she could update it to match, she literally just said no(?), so you have to wait for her exam blueprint to see the actual page numbers you should refer to. Her exam blueprints thankfully were very helpful - as long as you work through the learning objectives on the blueprint using the textbook, you will do very well on her exam tests, which are surprisingly easy (apart from a few questions on every test that have weird wording or formatting issues creating ambiguous questions). Overall lecture was not difficult at all, but it was very tedious. (Side note: she also has this obsession with plagiarism - she seems convinced that every single student will cheat at the first given opportunity, so you have to have a photo ID (student ID or driver's license) to turn in your exam. Otherwise it's not accepted and you get a zero. So be sure to have your student ID on exam day).

Lab: I can't even begin to describe the hellscape this lab was. Thankfully I had an awesome TA, otherwise I might have had a mental breakdown at some point. You just sit in groups working on 40-page word document worksheets. Labs, in essence, are supposed to serve the function of you learning everything about anatomy (ie, bone names, muscle names, tissue histology, etc.) so the lecture can focus on physiology. Because of the pointless worksheets, it really meant you spent hours (and I mean HOURS) of your own time teaching yourself a crap-ton of names & structures every week for the lab quizzes (on average, probably about 60-100 things per week - sometimes less & sometimes more). Lab quizzes (and lab practicals) were brutal. Beyond the sheer scope of the amount you have to learn each week, her quizzes and tests are riddled with typos/vague statements that make it more difficult than it needs to be. In theory, her lab assessments should have been as fair as the lecture exams were: learn everything in the "need to know" section of each lab worksheet, and you will be fine. However, SHE WOULD ASK YOU THINGS NOT INCLUDED IN THE NEED TO KNOW SECTION. Spending so many hours on your own time to learn everything you needed to, only to be asked something not included in the section telling you what she'll ask, is gut-wrenching and frustrating and depressing. This lab was advertised as having a dissection component (and even fulfills the lab requirement for bio majors), but we only did one (1) dissection the entire semester, and it was just a sheep brain that we cut in half twice to look at the lobes... not exactly a hugely comprehensive dissection experience. To be fair, this was an effective way of teaching. I can still name any bone of the human skeleton and a decent chunk of the muscles, and for that I'm grateful, but I think there were ways to accomplish that without putting your students thru so much.

I am not really writing all this to try and scare people away or to drag Massey, just to give you guys awareness of what you'll go through. If you don't need to take this class as a requirement for a grad school, I would advise against taking this class. You will learn a lot but it will be brutal and frustrating the whole way through (at least in lab. Lecture is easy). Massey seems like a nice enough person, so I feel kinda bad writing all this, but I really didn't like how she ran the class, and she came off as uncaring when we brought up concerns. She never really took steps to reconcile any issues and just brushed us off. I really, really, don't like to be mean, but just: be aware this will not be a fun class. You will learn a LOT, and if you put in a LOT of work you will get a good grade (despite all my whining, I did leave with a very high grade), but there's a high chance you'll hate it. If you do have to take it: good luck and Godspeed. For your sake I hope you get a good lab TA.

The course is extremely useful for anyone in pre-health and introduces you to lots of medical terminology as well. The professor is very unorganized and sometimes changes her mind at the last minute and might not tell you if she spontaneously removed something from the syllabus. Going off of what she says in lecture is definitely not enough - I highly highly recommend taking notes from the textbook. Going to lecture is still useful but only after you did the reading because she will add a few points of superficial information. The exams are not bad but I do not believe you could do well if you only go off of what she says in lecture. The time spent in lab is complete busywork and not helpful at all. It is also structured horribly. The only time I learned is when I memorized anatomy at home on my own, because in lab all we do is label structures we've never seen before. The experiments we do are also not very related. When studying for lab practicals, make sure you search up cadaver pictures as well as we aren't given any in class.

Massey barely lectures or teaches at all. She spends most of class asking "TopHat" questions on material we have barely covered. I have learned every bit of material from the textbook alone and am often more confused leaving lecture than I was beforehand. The only point of going to lecture was to get participation points for TopHat questions. One time she noticed that people were missing most of the questions and then acted like it was completely normal for an entire class to not understand the material in class.

She can explain simple things well but barely goes over the more complex topics that we need the most help on.

The lab for this class was also a joke. Our instructor had no idea what was going on. One of my lab partners knew more anatomy than our instructor. The lab also is super inconsistent in workload and is completely online doing only busy work labeling pictures and diagrams.

Massey is a very nice person but needs a lot of work as a professor.

I feel like leading up to this course I only heard horror stories, but I can say they are all just being dramatic. Massey is a little disorganized, but she is very clear with her communication and makes it easy to clarify anything that may be a cause for confusion. She is super nice and smart, but not the best lecturer, which is okay because you can learn everything you need to know for the exams from the textbook. Her lecture exams are crazy easy. I got minimum a of 95 on all 4 and I normally average Bs in bio classes. Now I will say, the lab is horrible, like actually bad. You just sit there and label for an hour and a half on your laptop. The practicals were pretty difficult but I don't think that is unique to Massey at all. The lab quizzes are headaches as the course progresses so really try to get as many points as possible early. I'd say this is the easiest bio class I've taken at UVA, and I am not a fan of bio AT ALL. #tCFfall22