Hi everyone, I will be freshman at cornell this year. Unfortunately, I went to enroll in classes 2 hours after it opened and both of my desired biology classes (BIOG 1350 and BIOG 1440) were taken, so I had to enroll in BIOG 1445. I’ve gathered that this is an auto-tutorial class? Can anyone who has had any form of experience with this class please tell me if it’s worth it/difficulty or if I should wait until spring semester to take one of the biology classes I wanted. I am already enrolled in CHEM 2070.
D is enrolled in 1445.1440 is a typical large lecture with 300 students that meets 3x a week with a weekly discussion section taught by a TA. 1445 is an autotutorial class where you are given the syllabus and you read the material yourself with deadlines to take quizzes in the testing center. Lecture is once per week. Quizzes/tests are oral so you have to thoroughly know the material.Testing in 1440 consists of four separate hour-long written exams. In 1445 you have to be good at sticking to deadlines of doing the reading and taking the quizzes and tests on your own. Also 1445 lab is slightly more intense than 1440 which is why 1445 is 4 credits vs.1440’s 3 credits. Content is supposed to be pretty much the same. So it really depends on how well you can work independently to learn the material, or if you learn better having more lectures with a weekly TA session to make sure you have the key concepts and understand the material.
1445 is hard, but so is 1440. I loved that I got the immediate feed back on how I was doing in the class, you learn the material more thoroughly because you speak it and write it. The oral exams…if you fail you just take it again. Dr. Campbell is very capable, a few of the TA’s are iffy, but most are very knowledgeable. . That being said the amount of dissections is a bit much, we dissect a rat (urogenital, digestive), and learn the anatomy through secondary dissection of a perch, mud puppy, turtle, squid, clam, crayfish, and shark. The hands-on visual/ highly interactive nature of this class is great! The material is broken up into weekly quizzes (so you avoid 2 prelims), but it can be stressful for some people because the dead lines are about 9 days apart. Taking Biog1445 leaves your schedule free (very nice), but you will ave to invest time on your own. And you bond with people (make a study group!). Unit 1, 2, and 3 don’t allow extensions, but you can use your 10 extension days for the other 7 units.
Here is unit 1: https://www.biog1445.org/framework/images/units/unit1.pdf
https://www.biog1445.org/framework/images/units/unit2.pdf