BME 3240

Lawrence is a great guy; he's fun to talk to and will meet with you at almost any time to help you understand the material. However, he is not very organized (you can see this just by the folders strewn about his office on the floor) and it negatively impacted the class. We would hop from one topic to another on a whim and it was difficult to understand the link between concepts. Also, we were supposed to have 6 tests over the semester and we only took 3, plus we didn't get to a final project that he had in mind.
This was one of my easiest and hardest classes that I've taken at UVA. On one hand we had only 4 homework assignments over the entire semester, and each one only had 2-3 problems. However, half the time I did not have any idea what was going on in class (and I truly mean this). Each class we had a practice problem that was "graded for completion", yet I got a 75% on one of them, and my friends got a few of them that were under 100% even when we fully completed them. Tests were hit or miss and you just prayed that material from the homework or practice problems would appear on it (if it didn't you were screwed because the homework and practice problems were basically all you had to study from). It was nice that he allowed us to still drop a test even though we only took 3, and he allowed us to skip the fourth test if we wanted (I did).
The TA we had was not very helpful. He was quite dismissive and he looked like he wanted to leave office hours whenever he held them. Therefore, he wasn't very approachable which made the class worse overall.
As to whether Lawrence is better than Helmke's, I don't know. We probably covered half the stuff Helmke covers and we did stuff that their class didn't even go into (momentum balances and their derivation comes to mind). That being said, if Lawrence becomes more organized and there is a helpful TA, I would say this class is better than Helmke's.