EOSC 326: Earth and Life Through Time (Distance Education)
Instructor: Louise Longridge
Course Grade will be based on:
2 Assignments (3 and 10.5% respectively)
5 Follow-up Question Sets (0.5%, 0.5%, 0.5%, 0.5%, 0.5% respectively)
2 Midterm Examinations (7% and 11% respectively)
4 Laboratories (5%, 3%, 5% and 3% respectively)
1 Final Examination (50%; Individual Portion is worth 85%, Group Portion is worth 15%).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first question that one might ask is: why is a Computer Science major taking this course? Here’s my 2 reasons: (1) I needed upper-level Science credits (2) I had to commute 4 hours daily and wanted to take an online course. Otherwise, I would have loved to take another CPSC course.
Despite my initial lack of interest in the subject, I found some parts of it quite interesting. Particularly, learning about how brachiopods and bivalves differ from one another and the fact that when the Isthmus of Panama was formed, it turned a passage in the sea into a passage between land masses (in this case, North America and South America).
Despite never having taken a biology course at a university level, I did surprisingly well in this course (got an A+!). The hardest part for me was learning the names of different species and body parts since I wasn’t used to it. But I repeatedly tested myself so I wouldn’t forget the names. I usually do this by recall - verbally telling myself about a certain species and its distinctive features. But I know other students use flash cards among other study methods - whichever ones work best for them.
This course tends to have averages in the high 70s, and ours was in that range. But I think it’s important to keep in mind despite this fact, not very many people take this course and there’s a fair bit of groupwork. By that I mean you have to actively participate in discussions in the group that you are assigned in, by agreeing on whatever solutions to labs that you previously had to come up with individually.
I think of all the courses that I took in my undergrad, this course had the most diverse methods of evaluating you - from labs to assignments to follow-up question sets. One of the assignments required you to read online research papers to delve deeper in a particular area that was introduced in the course (they’ll give you a set of general ideas to choose from, in which you have to specifically come up with a topic on your own).
For me, however, the hardest part of this course was probably the labs. For just one example, based on information on a fossil that they provide, you’d have to determine where it was buried and when it was buried there. It made sense that they’d test you on these things since they didn’t want labs to be an activity which you can breeze by with rote learning.
The reason why I did well in the course was largely influenced by my performance on the midterms and the final exam. How I prepared/studied for them was by typing up all the reading material into my own set of condensed notes. And, although it was just a small (but helpful) factor, we got to choose our own teammates for the group portion in the final exam. We worked in groups of 4 and I worked with 3 other teammates that I was assigned with in the course (my assigned group worked pretty well).
The midterms tested on small details since they were open book and each midterm was based on only a few modules. The final exam, though non-cumulative since it did not test on midterm material, still tested on extensive material (module C with marine organisms was immense). With this in mind, and the fact that the final exam’s individual portion is only 1.5 hours long, you can bet that the final exam will not be testing on small details (for the most part) and will just test on more important/significant details. The group portion was allocated 50 min.