BIOL 4310

Provencio is an amazing lecturer and an extremely nice person overall. His office hours were always helpful in answering content questions. He also offers to set up individual meeting times to go over exams with him, which is helpful. I really did enjoy the content of the class. He does paper discussions where he expects you to have read and completely understood a scientific paper for in class discussion. I was nervous for those, but they ended up being very interesting and fun. Unfortunately, my interest in the copious amount of material and the amount I studied did not reflect my grade. The class average was never higher than an 80. He asks very vague and almost "out of left field" questions. Exams are 40 mc questions, so no room for error. The grading scale is frustrating. It feels like you are in competition with your classmates, because you are.

I was expecting this class to be easy based on these reviews and now I realize these reviews are 10 years old. Iggy is a great lecturer and has a clear passion for the content and scientific discovery. I went to office hours weekly and he was always happy to overexplain things sometimes. That being said, this course was challenging and pretty frustrating for me at times. He makes his tests so that the average is a C+ which results in exams with nit picky questions on content he didn't even emphasize. His slides are very content heavy and you should basically know everything he covers. I studied so hard for the exams, but there was virtually no pay out. Because the final isn't cumulative, there was no incentive to review old exams so that could be on me. If you want an easy A bio course for your 4th year, you should look at another class.

Provencio is great. There were 3 exams and the lowest grade was dropped. He also gives attendance quizzes every now and then. This class wasn't difficult at all, but don't let it sit on the back burner. You still have to put in the time to do well.

This class was cake. Dr. Provencio was very approachable and enthusiastic about the material. He really emphasizes techniques, understanding how to read scientific papers, and signal transduction pathways. The exams are pretty straightforward and if you do well on the first three exams, you have the option of not taking the final. Overall, the material is just super fascinating. This was probably my most favorite class at UVA ever.