BIOL 4270

This class is not much work but a whole lot of hands on experience and pretty interesting if you are into animals. Plus it is a painless way to fulfill a 400 level lab. Professor Kawasaki is very nice and knowledgable.

A relatively easy 400-level lab course. The lab reports are fairly straightforward. The material is interesting and most of the work is hands-on.

Great class, upper level lab, no reading outside of class, 6 total lab reports over the semestre, make sure to take it

Dedicate sufficient time to understanding the experiments and writing reports. Easy and so fun.

Professor Kawasaki is amazing. He replies to emails almost immediately when you have a question, even after 10 pm. The TA, Ashli Moore, clearly doesn't want to be there and her grading on lab reports oftentimes makes no sense (she'll take off 2 points for one person and not for another when their answers were the same). However, the grading is still easy and you are pretty much guaranteed at least a B+ if you do the lab reports. You don't do a lab report each week but towards the end you may do 2 in one week. The experiments are pretty cool, although sometimes tedious or a bit lackluster. All in all I would recommend this class: Not much outside work other than lab reports, almost no reading, no midterm, no finals, easy grading.

Professor Kawasaki is brilliant and is incredibly kind. He makes himself available to the students at all times. Ashli was nice, but it was clear that she wasn't really interested in sitting around for 4 hours. She grades all but one of the lab reports, and her grading is inconsistent. She takes off way too many points for menial details. The grade distribution was definitely not all A's. Only 52% of students in my semester got A's, and 48% got B's and C's. The class is only time consuming when there is a lab report due, which is not every week.

Professor Kawasaki is an amazing teacher, the class is pretty fun, and the work load is really easy to manage. If I remember correctly, there are a total of 6 or 7 reports. Some span over a couple weeks, some are just two weeks' worth.

The class was probably the easiest upper level biology lab at UVA. Professor Kawasaki is helpful with the labs, and the grading is pretty lenient.

This class was great. Iggy is the coolest teacher and he really knows what he is talking about. He encourages participation and his quizzes are a joke! His tests are challenging, but if you take good notes you can easily get an A-. He also drops 1 of the 3 tests which is awesome. I learned a lot and he was super approachable.

Ahhhh the hamsterssss!(: Overall I would really recommend this course. Each lab is pretty interesting cause you get to work with different animals and learn about certain behavioral processes like habituation, sensory cues, bio clocks, and electrophysiology! I took the course to learn more about the neuro mechanisms underlying behavior, but unfortunately it mostly focuses on generic behavior with only some discussion of neuro.

It's a fairly easy A if you just put a little time into the lab reports. There are 7 in total, and they're waited slightly differently depending on their difficulty. All are definitely doable if you just read the course packet information, take notes in class (he lectures on the lab for about the first hour), and ask questions!

The labs take a variable amount of time, with some taking just a couple weeks and others taking several weeks. Because of this, the report due dates are sort of randomly spread over the whole semester. He gives a week to do each report, and office hours were held a couple days before they were due. Usually you won't have to do a report two weeks in a row. The reports took me about 10-14 hours on average, but they seemed to take 6-10 hours for most people.

Kawasaki may be soft-spoken and a little dry, but he is so polite and always willing to help. He'll walk around the room and observe everybody's progress, and if he hears a question he'll draw a diagram and start explaining before he was even asked it. He really enjoys his work, and it comes through in his small conversations with students throughout the lab.