Syllabus

Course Meeting Times

Lectures: 3 sessions / week, 1 hour / session

Recitations: 2 sessions / week, 1 hour / session

Prerequisites

There are no formal prerequisites for this course, but we do presuppose high school–level biology and chemistry (especially familiarity with the fundamental aspects of chemical structure).

Before taking this course, you may want to review Pre-7.01 Getting up to Speed in Biology, a self-paced course designed to help prepare students for their first college-level biology class.

Text

The required textbook is: Sadava, D.E., D.M. Hills, H.C. Heller, and M. Berenbaum. Life, the Science of Biology, 10th edition. W. H. Freeman, 2012. ISBN: 9780321558237.

Recitations

Regular weekly attendance is expected. Each recitation section meets twice per week for 50 minutes. Recitation problems and solutions are available in the recitations section.

Assignments

While general discussions and collaboration on the problem sets is appropriate, detailed discussion of specific solutions or sharing of answers is a violation of the trust placed in all students in the class, each of whom is expected to produce their own unique set of answers. Students who copy problem sets or allow their answers to be copied will be assigned a 0 for that problem set, and may be assigned a 0 for all the problem sets.

Exams

There will be three exams each worth 100 points offered during class time on dates that are posted in the lecture schedule. There will be NO lecture and recitations on exam days. In addition, there will be a comprehensive final worth 200 points given during the finals week. The final exam will be a 3-hour-long cumulative exam, covering the entire course. 

Grading

Your overall course grade will depend on the following components: