This class taught me so much, and I always went into every exam confident that I had a great grasp on the material and could do well, but Wormington's exams are incredibly hard to do well on. He is a good lecturer and teaches well, but at the end of the semester he decided to change the grading scale from the typical 3/7 cutoffs for -/+ grades to 2/8- effectively curving anyone close to a + down, and anyone in the - range up. When other students questioned this his responses were incredibly and unnecessarily rude. I personally should have gotten a B+ and was curved down to a B because of his grading scale change.

So this review comes from the full COVID semester and a student who got an A in the class.

As with every other class and thing in the world, this semester was like no other. Normally, Wormington set up the distribution of class to be 3 midterms each worth 20%, a non-cumulative final worth 25%, and homework worth 15% (on which you can get over 100). This semester, everything was worth 20%, the final was still non-cumulative, and the max score for the homework was about 122%. All lectures were held on zoom synchronously MWF, even on exam days, but were also recorded and available to rewatched up to the night before an exam. This was really helpful, because if you've read any review of Wormington's cell bio, you'll see everyone saying he goes very quickly through the material every day. On the first day of class, he went through in 10 minutes what a normal teacher would take 50 minutes to cover, and that got worse as the class went on. Good thing, is you get used to it, and by the end of the semester I found that I only rewatched lectures to get small tidbits that I missed. The first three exams were difficult, but I ended up getting 90, 94, and 90 on them, respectively. If you start studying a week before, they are very doable. The last exam was very difficult, and I ended up getting an 82 on it, even though I studied for about two weeks for it during finals week. If you do the math, that averages out to an 89 average. How did I get an A? The homework. Five questions assigned after each class and 8 am before the next class. On average, I spent about 1 hour on each homework set. Some days they were really easy, and I spent about 15 to 20 minutes on them, other days I would spend up to 2 hours on them. Don't spend more than 2 hours on them, because even though they come from old exams, they do not cover everything you need to know for the exam. There are several bonus homework assignments, and this semester these allowed the max homework score to be 122. I go a 118 on the homework, netting me ~94-95 overall in the class, in the A range. Wormington also gives essential questions for each unit, stuff you can tell he covers when you go back through and study everything for the exams. I would recommend making sure you can answer those questions, and going through the slides and make sure you can explain everything on the slides. If you can, go to lecture live, then rewatch later before the next lecture. This will allow you to get the most out of the recorded lectures and not have to rewatch every lecture on a binge before the exam. His office hours are very useful, as he often gives away homework answers and can answer a lot of questions you might have. An A in this class is very doable, but requires a significant amount of work.