Genetics

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Ashley1989

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Hey all,
I just wanted to post a quick thread and am hoping for just a couple of replies at best and then it can be buried. Basically, I'm worried. I'm taking Genetics this quarter and our professor was recently hired so no one knows her testing style. She's a great teacher, but I'm worried because as we were asking questions about our exam she said to know the main concepts but to not worry about calculations. We haven't done any calculations in class and she advised us to not spend our time going through the problems in the book because it wouldn't be useful on the test. When someone in the class asked if we should bring a calculator to the exam she said no. I've talked to other people at my school who have taken it before and they have had a very different experience. Has anyone here had a really heavy theory based genetics class with maybe one calculation a test? To be fair she did say to know the theory of Chi-square analysis. Basically, should I be worried? I've always thought (and heard) that Genetics was more number heavy and am stressing out because it doesn't seem like this is the norm.
Ashley

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Hey all,
I just wanted to post a quick thread and am hoping for just a couple of replies at best and then it can be buried. Basically, I'm worried. I'm taking Genetics this quarter and our professor was recently hired so no one knows her testing style. She's a great teacher, but I'm worried because as we were asking questions about our exam she said to know the main concepts but to not worry about calculations. We haven't done any calculations in class and she advised us to not spend our time going through the problems in the book because it wouldn't be useful on the test. When someone in the class asked if we should bring a calculator to the exam she said no. I've talked to other people at my school who have taken it before and they have had a very different experience. Has anyone here had a really heavy theory based genetics class with maybe one calculation a test? To be fair she did say to know the theory of Chi-square analysis. Basically, should I be worried? I've always thought (and heard) that Genetics was more number heavy and am stressing out because it doesn't seem like this is the norm.
Ashley

Eh, I wouldn't be too worried. When I took genetics it was basically Molecular Biology-lite: mostly theory and thought experiments, pretty much no calculations beyond very basic probability you could figure out in your head.
 
Eh, I wouldn't be too worried. When I took genetics it was basically Molecular Biology-lite: mostly theory and thought experiments, pretty much no calculations beyond very basic probability you could figure out in your head.

This makes me feel a lot better, thanks. It just made me very nervous when people told me about it being calculation heavy etc. and I was scared I was getting some kind of off the wall class. Thank you. :)
 
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Good luck, Ashley! I'm probably taking Genetics next quarter (if I can't get into my lab). So excited. =)
 
Good luck, Ashley! I'm probably taking Genetics next quarter (if I can't get into my lab). So excited. =)

Thanks Aerus! I'm sure you will do great when you take it :) it's really interesting, just completely different from what I expected. I thought we were going to be cranking out numbers like a biostat class.
 
Eh, I wouldn't be too worried. When I took genetics it was basically Molecular Biology-lite: mostly theory and thought experiments, pretty much no calculations beyond very basic probability you could figure out in your head.

+1 Genetics was so much fun! :luck: I also learned that sometimes the TAs are looking for specific answers in the problem sets e.g. I wanted to use C. elegans instead of Drosophila as a sample organism for one of the question and when I checked with the TA he said the professor was "looking" for an answer using Drosophila. Just FYI...
 
The only math I remember in genetics was simple probability stuff, which you wouldn't need a calculator for, and chi-square tests, which your professor may just have you set up and not solve or just stick to theory/purpose.
 
Where I took genetics, the minutiae was much more of a test discriminator than any calculations. Lots of dense concepts and lots of esoteric trivia made it a challenging but fun course.
 
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