Great course in terms of the lab and the organisms dissected. Lecture was not as interesting.

Have to read the "optional books"

Easy class! The majority of the grade is dependent upon your lab participation and quizzes. The weekly quizzes are only based on what you need to know for lab that day, so once you learn the material for that week, you can usually forget them. Sometimes, you'll need to know important parallels between the different animals studied, but nothing major. Four midterms on material from the book, but you really don't have to read the textbook because he talks about everything you'll need to know for the test during the class. Kopeny isn't really good at replying to emails or making himself available but TAs were plenty!

This class is split into two parts: lecture and lab. The lab is really great. Every dissection is interesting and I felt that I learned a lot from it. The lecture, however, is absolutely TERRIBLE. Listening to Kopeny read off his slides is torture and because of this, I would NOT recommend this class.

Course is divided into two portions. The lab which is divided into participation (20%) and quizzes (55%). Quizzes vary in difficulty depending on your TA. Studying for the quizzes requires reading through your manual and taking notes on Kopeny's pre-lab talks which form the second half of Thursday lectures. The labs are fun as you get to dissect various vertebrate animals from fish to cats as you progress through the timeline of vertebrate evolution. Lecture is not as fun as the lab portion. Even though it's only worth 25% of your grade, I found Kopeny's lecturing style to be enthusiastic yet difficult to follow. Would not take another lecture with Kopeny, but this course's saving grace is its 75% lab grade, which still means you have to study for the lecture exams (4 of them). For the lecture exams, you need to go to class and take notes, reading the book fills in the gaps but lecture gives you an idea of where he's going with the slides. I would recommend taking this class because of the dissections and just how much I learned about anatomy and biological roles of systems. Take the time to study the lab manual thoroughly, lab guides, lecture, textbook, evodevo theory behind each system as it progresses from fish to mammals, etc. and you'll take a lot more from this course than just a not so difficult A.

I really liked this course! The labs are really fun and interesting. The lecture portion of the course isn't the best but it only counts for 25% of your grade. Not a very hard class. I recommend it. Also, Margot is a wonderful TA!

The weekly quizzes aren't that hard and the dissections are really fun. You basically work at your own pace with your partner and study the whole time for the quiz. Quizzes are worth 55 percent of your grade with and addition 20 percent for participation. This means only 25 percent of your grade comes from 4 non-culmulative lecture tests. Good for an upper level lab course. I would recommend it.

Kopeny changed the way he graded this class. Dissections counted for majority of class. Lab quiz every week. Easy if you read the manual and memorize the structures. Labs were fun. I definitely recommend it. Midterms were easy if you studied. Kopeny + TAs definitely want you to do well.

i personally dont find this topic (how morphology has evolved in vertebrates to adapt functionally) terribly interesting, and kopeny tends to give very detail oriented lectures. the details are tested along with broader concepts. the weekly dissection lab was pretty cool except for the copious amounts of formaldehyde. the grading for this class this semester was weird, with a quiz each week in lab and 3 midterms, all of which counted for almost exactly the same percent of the final grade (about 6-7% each). kopeny is definitely a very nice guy thoguh, so im sure he would be awesome at office hours.

Great class. All of the labs are dissection based, so you can't go wrong. Also, Dr. Kopeny brings in his pet hawk for the bird dissection. Nuf' said.