BIOL 3050

*The instructors for this course were both Professor Provencio and Campbell!*

People are going to complain a lot about this course, but honestly it isn't even that bad. I found it to be super interesting and fun, and I think anyone would if you're actually into neuroscience! Things got messed up with our final exam which hurt some people's grades, so it's best to prepare yourself to study A LOT for each exam, not just the final. I would take notes during lecture, and then take brand new notes a second time with a recording; that way I went over the information twice to make sure I didn't miss anything since each lecture is incredibly dense. They offer a very generous curve with the median of the class (probably usually in the 60s-70 range) being placed at the bottom of the B-bin, rather than actually a C or D. I definitely recommend!

This class was needlessly difficult. Your entire grade is based of 5 exams, 4 midterms and a final, meaning your grade comes down to 200 multiple choice questions. This would be fine except for the fact that they offer no study guide, review sessions, practice exams, recorded lectures, extra credit, corrections, nor do they even allow you to have the test to see what you got wrong after the exam outside of office hours. Not to mention that the final had to be cancelled due to weather, meaning the whole grade was actually only four exams and they provided no remedy or solution. You have to learn the extremely technical and complex material through the textbook and the vague slides from the lectures. There is a curve, but it pits students against one another and is incredibly demotivating. Everyone who scores from the median exam grade to a couple questions above gets a B, and then above that gets a B+ and below gets a B- and so on. I improved significantly on the later tests compared to the earlier ones, but since everyone else also improved, my grade remained the same and even got slightly worse, which is so discouraging. In my opinion, it should be possible for every student to get an A, but this course is designed so that is basically impossible. Provencio and Campbell are nice people and are clearly very knowledgeable about neuroscience, and they captured my interest frequently as a prospective neuroscience major, but i wouldn't recommend this class to any non-neuro majors due to the terrible structure.

I took this as a first-year having only taken AP Bio, and I thought the class was very challenging but got an A- after lots of studying. Professor Ignacio Provencio wrote really hard exams and taught the first half, so the grade averages were lower. Campbell made the second half of the course which was a lot easier--HOWEVER, since the course was curved around the median it didnt really matter if you improved. If everyone improves, your improvment may not matter at all. The average of the first two tests was like an 62 where as the final was a 90 so that really messed things up for some people because the class average randomly shot up, making it harder to get an A.

RECORD YOUR OWN LECTURES! make chatgpt give you practice problems and go to office hours. ask the TAs for help!!

overall, very very interesting class but NOT an easy A by any means.

This semester there was a snow day which moved exam 4 to be our final exam. Exam 4 was also extremely easy and had a median in the 90s with very little standard deviation. This is ok except the whole point of this class's grading scheme is a bell shaped curve so that people can demonstrate their knowledge and where they stand in the class. So with exam 4 being so high there was no way to significantly improve your grade. So essentially our grade was determined by exam 3.

Additionally, the way this class is graded is that they subtract from 100 the median and divide the bins by 5, setting the median as the end of a B. This makes it hard to do extremely poor in the class, but also makes it hard to do extremely well. On one of our exams the highest score was a 92 and on another the highest score was a 95; however, they still subtracted from 100 to set the grading distributions instead of standard deviation. Because this is an undergraduate neurobiology course most people are wanting an A to apply to grad school; however, getting an A required extremely statistically high grades as the grading bins were out of 100 and not based on standard deviation. For instance, in our final grade, he posted the distribution and around 15 people out of 215ish (according to sis) received an A/A+ in the class. This is similar to cell, which is known as the hardest biology class at UVA, yet throughout the semester they kept reiterating to students how there would be a curve.

Additionally, this class is very complicated and the professors refused to record the lectures. I never understand when professors do this, as students pay for all the equipment in these lecture halls and to hear them teach material that is not their firsthand research.

Overall, the course content is interesting, but I feel like this class will turn into another class that students avoid to have a high gpa for grad school applications.

There was supposed to be 5 exams, but due to the weather the cumulative final was cancelled. On the first exam I got 70%, second exam 85%, third exam 95%, and fourth exam 100%, ending with overall percentage of 88.5% which came out to be A- after the curve. I ended with a lower grade in this class than in orgo 1 and 2.

The curve for Fall 2025:
A+ : 94.88 - 100
A : 89.75 - 94.87
A- : 84.63 - 89.74
B+ : 79.50 - 84.62
B : 74.38 - 79.49

I didn't read the textbook before the lectures like I did with my other classes because it's very dense. The lecture is based on the studies covered in the textbook. I took notes during lectures and studied by going through my notes and revising by digging into the textbook. I also used chatgpt a LOT to clarify questions I had since some of the circuits can be confusing. The slides are mostly pictures from the textbook about the studies. I literally copied the captions under the pictures in the slides from the textbook into chatgpt to understand the points of the studies. For exams, know the setup and outcomes of each study, the circuits that are mentioned and how they work in the presence or absence of different parts, and little informations that are written in the slides. You want to know everything well to be safe for the exam. The things you think might not be on the exam may be on the exam.

The only extra credit opportunity you have is by responding to 80% or more of the pollev questions throughout the semester. Only 1% is added to your overall grade at the end.

I wasn't too happy about the grading because it seemed that the exams I did bad on weighed more than the good scores. The contents of the class is interesting. My friends took it with Condron and heard that he allows cheat sheets for exams on top of a grading curve. Would recommend it with Condron more than Provencio/Campbell.