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smaley's picture

As strongly as I disliked

As strongly as I disliked Intro Bio at the time, I think that it should be an important part of the bio curriculum at Bryn Mawr, and that it should serve as a foundation for future classes to build upon.  Unfortunately, I do not feel that this is the case at Bryn Mawr.  Like many others who took intro bio, I remember very little from it.  In fact, one of the few things that I really do remember about the class is how much I disliked its organization.  To me, it felt more like four 200 level courses, taught by four very different professors, all squeezed into a year.  Instead of learning the basics, that I could later build upon, I learned, and later forgot, quite a bit that I do not consider basic.  In addition to that, many of the courses I have later taken have assumed that we never learned the basics, and these basics were re-taught, taking up valuable time in the semester.  

I feel like one of the major flaws when it comes to intro classes, both at Bryn Mawr and elsewhere, is that there is no set definition of basics, and because of this students are often retaught some topics multiple times, while other topics are never taught at all.  Until a set definition of "basic" is obtained, I feel that little improvement can be made to intro classes.   

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