BIOL 3710

If you've taken some 3000 level Bio classes at UVA already, and you're great at being able to think like your professor, and guess on multiple choice exams then this is the class for you. It comes off as easy on most of these reviews, but Menaker's since changed his style, and the quizzes every Friday are pretty difficult. These are your only grades, so be wary that 13, 10 point quizzes will determine your grade, and he WILL trick you. He contradicts himself constantly, gets in lighthearted arguments with student during class where he always tells you that you're wrong, and if you go to office hours looking for help he will be vague, so make sure to have distinct questions about something he went over in lecture. Do not ask about how to prepare for the quizzes because he will just tell you to ~understand~ the material, so he's really no help in that aspect. Some people do super well in this class, but if you're coming in expecting an easy A you'd be wrong.

Menaker is old and doesn't give a shit, this is good and bad.

Good: the class is low effort, and he talks about really random but interesting things

Bad: he doesn't really care if his quizzes are fair or not

The quizzes are very tricky, as in, they do not go over in class and hard to find in the readings. Good luck in guessing his answer choices.

Wow! What a nice GPA! Just kidding, do not take this course. Play a random guessing game on the quizzes, chances are it won't matter because Menaker does not care what you get. Was the quiz too hard? Too bad, that's exactly how he likes it. Curve? Who knows, he says he can curve up or down (lucky us). Weekly readings? Yup, and random numbers from long scientific journals will be on the quizzes. How about grading? Well, in other words F me

Did not like this course at all. Did not see any relation to stress at all and all he talks about is the circadian rhythm and the light / dark cycle. Quizzes were way to tricky then needed to be and the readings were dreadful. I personally would not recommend this class.

I want to start by saying that I took this class because I thought it would be easy and because I wanted to learn about the biological effects of stress. There were only 2 or 3 weeks that we talked about stress and most of the others were about circadian rhythms, which is Menaker's field so we read a lot of the papers he published. I took this class thinking it would be very little work and a relatively easy A, but I was only correct on one of those things. There's really not a lot of work because you have quizzes every Friday and you just have to go to class and read a couple papers for that so it doesn't take much of your time. This class is definitely not one to take if you want an easy A though. The quizzes get increasingly difficult throughout the semester and some questions come from very specific things in the reading or concepts you have to apply so it is not always just based on whether you paid attention, which he says is all you have to do. Also, SUPER IMPORTANT you cannot ever skip class!!! Sure it may seem like he doesn't always talk about anything particularly important in class, but Menaker is like 80 years old and doesn't know how to use technology, meaning he doesn't send emails when he makes changes to the class schedule. So if you fall asleep, zone out, or aren't in class and miss a big announcement you're screwed. I am a chronic skipper so I know I brought some of this on myself, but one Friday he cancelled the quiz and didn't send an email so I showed up to take the quiz and there wasn't one (oh well), and then he cancelled the last day of class and we had the final quiz on Wednesday instead of that Friday but he didn't send an email so guess who wasn't there and got a 0 on the last quiz of the semester. My friend in the class who shows up didn't even know this was happening either so if you still decide to take this class make sure to always go to class and never miss a word that comes out of his mouth because he will not send an email with that information.

NOT AN EASY A. Do not take this class it has nothing to do with stress we spent almost the whole semester studying circadian rhythms of every single animal and then at the end we talked about hibernation in bears and ground squirrels. Save yourself the agony. Weekly quizzes and no final sounds good but the quizzes are hard and on a subject I couldn't care less about.