BIOL 3410

Overall, I found this to be the easiest bio course at UVA, but it was far from the most enjoyable.

Lecture: grades in the lecture portion of the class make up 75% of your overall grade, with a total of 60% of your overall grade being exams. In terms of the overall format of the class, it's incredibly disorganized. Massey really tries to help by sending out "student notes," essentially a fill in outline, but her lectures don't always coincide with those so keep that in mind. The tophat questions she asks are beyond tedious, but if you go to class and simply complete them, it's an easy 100 in that category. I found studying those to be incredibly helpful. However, even if only <10% of the class got the question right, she would not go over it in class.

This is the only bio class where I'd say you genuinely should READ THE TEXTBOOK. Coming to lectures is obviously important too, but the textbook makes SO much more sense and I did a lot better on the tests after reading and taking notes on it. Really helps put the lectures into context. I did find the tests to be pretty straightforward compared to every other bio class I've taken here.

The lab portion of this class was a NIGHTMARE. My TA was fine, but the format of the class is essentially completing worksheets for 3 hours in lab each week, filling out "exit tickets," then completing absurdly hard quizzes due every Sunday. It was an unreasonable amount of information to have learned in such a short period of time, and myself and many other students would do quite poorly. The lab practicals focused on rote memorization (of over 300 terms) rather than actually understanding, and we only did 1 actual dissection. This should have been worth WAY more than 1 credit hour, spending 3 hours in lab every week and another 3-4 studying/taking the quizzes.

Summary: go to class and read the textbook. If you do well in the lecture portion of the class, it makes up for bad scores on lab practicals (worth ~5% of your overall grade each). The content is interesting, but you'll definitely need to study on your own. #tCFfall2022

This is one of the easiest biology classes that you will take at UVA. The lecture exam questions are very straightforward compared to the others (ironically easier than introductory bio) There are 4 midterms and 1 final and you get one drop (each exam is 40 questions worth 150 points out of 1000 points). She will post an exam review sheet and host a Jeopardy review session before every exam. However, the course is highly disorganized. The professor always starts the class 10-15 minutes late. The exams are multiple-choice and taken with a pencil and bubble sheet, so she takes over a week to get them graded and returned to us. She is very rigid and makes students sign up for Friday sessions to come and review their exams. During these review sessions, you can only take notes with a pen and paper. You do not have access to your exam after that. Every Friday, she only lets 30/400 students review the exam and the spots fill up very quickly, so make sure that you check your emails regularly. Please make sure you check your grades regularly because she tends to mess grades up a lot. Be prepared to have to regularly email her to remind her about things because she is one of the most disorganized professors I have had. There are 150 miscellaneous points (TopHat attendance questions, homework problem sets, and weekly quizzes), which are very easy to attain. The lecture material is quite straightforward, but TopHat attendance is 20/1000 points of your grade, so you must make sure you have TopHat pulled up during class time if you decide not to go to class. She has YouTube-recorded lectures. During lectures, she is quite lackadaisical and students tend to talk over her and have side conversations. She always starts the class 10-15 minutes late because she has technical issues. In conclusion, the course material is important for medical, PA, PT, dental schools but the professor is not very effective. Compared to other biology classes, it is very easy and getting an A (930/1000 points) is not hard if you put in a reasonable amount of time to study for the lecture exams.

Anatomy Lab Review: The lab portion of the course is where the real nightmare comes into play. It is 25% of your overall grade (250/1000 points). There is an obscene amount of terms that you have to memorize. You have to memorize all of the bones and the names of the different parts of the bones. You also have to do the same thing for the nerves and the muscles. There are like 200 terms that you need to know for each of the 2 lab exams. Each lab exam is only worth 45 points (4.5% of your overall grade) but requires at least 10-15 hours of studying per week for the two weeks leading up to the lab exam since there is such an obscene amount of stuff that you need to memorize. Each exam is during lab. There are about 50-60 questions and they are arranged in stations. You rotate around and write your answers as you go. There are also weekly lab quizzes that are worth 10 points each (your 6 highest scores get recorded). These are taken online during your own time but the professor makes an egregious amount of errors on them. After taking each weekly quiz, make sure that you review the quiz with your TA during your lab session and make sure that all errors are corrected. Not everyone has the same quiz questions. All online assessments are taken from randomly generated question banks. During lab, your TA will just sit on the computer and you have to go up to them to ask questions. My TA had to Google most of the questions that we asked him. Therefore, the lab is very autonomous and you have to teach yourself most of the content. There are activity sheets and exit tickets that you must complete during labs and the activity pages are dozens of pages each, which you are expected to read before lab. Therefore, make sure you get all of the answers from your TA at the end of the lab to make sure that you are not teaching yourself wrong information. I would strongly suggest signing up for a lab session with friends and finding people to study with outside of class. For a class with so much memorization, it is important to test each other. The lecture is not bad, other than the fact that they are very disorganized. However, the lab is egregiously awful because it is so autonomous and the TAs do not know the material well. There are also no lab office hours, so it is very hard to review the content without the models. I would strongly suggest getting to know several classmates and studying together.

If you are willing to put in a reasonable amount of effort, getting an A or even an A+ (970/1000) points is not that hard as long as you ensure that you get at least a 90% on the lecture exams and don't bomb the lab exams too badly (and of course making sure you get all of the miscellaneous points). It is good to also get a taste of some of the things you will need to know for medical, PA, PT, and dental schools. This is also a 4-credit class so it is a good GPA booster.

Please don't take this class. The VA grades are misleading. If you are pre-health, this is NOT the 4 credit biology class to take, I recommend STAT 2020 another 4 credit pre-health class.

The class is very disorganized which makes it hard to well in the class.

Lecture Exams- Study the textbook well, memorize the slide decks, and do TOPHAT question and connect reviews to perfection. To get an A in her class you need to ace her lecture exams, so please study hard and try to get 95/100s.

Lab Exams/Lab- You will get absolutely RAILED here so study study study and aim for 70-80s on lab exams,100s on assignments, 90s on the quizzes.

You need to get a 100 on everything in the class which is doable. Goal is to get 930/1000 points for an A so allocate 50 points to mess up in lab and 20 for lecture exams and you should get an A.

Overall, I hated going to class because her lectures were boring and hard to follow . Labs were a nightmare but my TA and group was nice. Good thing I made friends in lecture or life in this class would be worse.

If you need sign to not take this class, here it is. Don't take it bc you self-teach this class, it's boring, full of busy work, and professor is mean.

Dr. Massey is a great instructor. Her lectures are concise and easy to understand. The textbook is pretty helpful at clearing up difficult concepts but you dont really need it to be successful. Lab is very difficult though. The lab practical makes this the most difficult lab I've ever had as a biology major. They just set out a bunch of models and make you identify the most obscure features of a bone, muscle, etc and these practicals make up the bulk of your lab grade so study at least 2 weeks in advance to have a shot at passing them. Lecture exams are very simple though, basic memorization and recall.

Massey is kind of all over the place and I feel like she doesn't go in depth enough on certain topics and breezes too quickly through others. Overall, lecture isn't too bad and the exams are like right off the slides/lectures (I never read the textbook). This is a class of how much effort you are willing to put in.

Grades - does a 1000 point system, normal 97/93 etc. cutoffs

150 points each 4 midterms, 1 final but takes the top 4 grades only

up to 70 points from top 7 weekly HW quizzes, multiply grade by 10

20 points tophat participation

60 points from top 6 connect quizzes

LAB - 250 points

two 65 point lab exams

48 points from activities

12 from participation

60 from top 6 post-lab quizzes

#tCFF23

Not a difficult class, but not enjoyable. Massey is nice and means well, but she is not as organized/timely as she thinks she is. She is a slow grader and made a lot of minor technological errors throughout the semester that made learning more difficult. In theory, the material should be interesting but Massey is not an engaging lecturer or does not cover content more than surface level/what you would read in a textbook. Reading the textbook and taking notes isn't 100% necessary to do well, but you should at least skim it because some of the exam questions will ask about specific concepts that she doesn't talk about but are in the book. You need to pay for it anyway to access the CONNECT review assignments and another program for the lab. She also makes you pay for access to TopHat clicker questions which I don't understand since there are free programs she could use. Instead of giving back exams or posting a key, you needed to sign up for exam review which I found inconvenient.

Lab sucks. The TA was useless. Every lab is spent filling out long worksheets where you label stuff, but since they are so long, my lab partners and I would divide the material and I would end up only learning 25% of the content. This became an issue when studying for the lab practicals, which cover an obscene amount of information that you need to teach yourself entirely. Apparently, the practicals were worth more this semester too. Weekly lab quizzes had 3 attempts, but they were very difficult and feedback was not always provided.

Overall, there are a lot of easy points to earn and it will not be difficult to do well if you put in effort, but I will not be taking another semester with her. #tCFF23

I was part of Professor Massey's first class at UVA. I thought she did a wonderful job, had very structured lectures, was accommodating and nice to her students. There was a point where students that didn't perform as well as they wanted, blamed the professor and were often mean to her. I felt really bad as she did everything she could, especially adjusting to a new university. There were some hiccups with Collab and her figuring out the system at first, but she did so quickly and was aware of her mistakes without this hurting students. This class is SOLELY memorization, no matter the professor. It is fully the student's responsibility to perform high on the exams, as all of the content is laid out and relayed to the students in its entirety.

With that said, it was one of my favorite science classes at UVA. I overall loved the content and found it useful for my future in medicine. Very practical and beneficial for any pre-health student.

Life Hack: Take PSYC 3200 or BIOL 3050 before this class because the last 2 units are almost the same as what you go over in those 2 classes!! Except ofc you’ll learn things you didn’t before

First things first, my review may be a bit biased because I ended with an A+. I thought it was decently easy as a class overall. You quickly learn that you never have to read the textbook (although I used it to get definitions for terms and for things I needed more understanding on). What I did that made me successful in this class is attend lecture, take notes, then rewatch the lectures, adding to my notes because she does go pretty quick. And thats it. By watching the lectures I felt much more confident in the content for the tests without even studying. I did still study 3-5 days before the tests by answering the learning objectives. Theyre very helpful and will guarantee you an A on the tests if you can explain each of them. I would write your answers on paper to solidify your understanding even more and make sure your very in depth in them. I typically over studied for each of the tests, but there was always 1 or 2 questions on the tests that were not talked about at all or are very very tricky. Another thing is that the homework is an easy grade boost, but was at some points frustrating and time consuming.

The lab is a different story... It is the hardest part of the class and is set up horribly. the lab assignments are pure busy work and i never actually learned anything after they were done. Lab, for me, always ended very early, typically only taking an hour. By the end of the class, we joined with another group, making them go by super quick. My TA was lazy and not helpful but he graded our practicals easy, at least thats what he said. if you want to do well on the practicals be ready to study a f ton. Don't just do quizlets either, make a powerpoint or print our pictures or something. I somehow ended with an 100 on the first one and a B on the second practical, but def be sure to study.