Andrew Swafford

This was Swafford's second time teaching this course, and he was very open about testing out new assignments, some of which worked well and other's less so. The main bulk of the course are discussions (or parlors) where you have to find a paper under a certain theme or topic and discuss it and exams. I really enjoyed these and they were a great opportunity to apply what we had learned in lecture to research papers. Swafford offered oral in-person exams, which I REALLY liked. At first this seemed daunting but he is a very kind grader and you spend ~15 minutes answering the question and you leave his office knowing your grade right away, opposed to taking a 2-3 hour exam and getting it back weeks later. On the less positive side, this course has a lot of readings, and I found about half to be really dense and not super related to the lecture material. It also felt like the majority of time focussed on micro evolution and cellular processes, and as someone who is much more interested in evolution on a larger scale I was a bit disappointed by this. All in all, a great course!

This was Swafford's second time teaching this course, and he was very open about testing out new assignments, some of which worked well and other's less so. The main bulk of the course are discussions (or parlors) where you have to find a paper under a certain theme or topic and discuss it and exams. I really enjoyed these and they w …Read more

Andrew works really hard to make the class exciting and is open to feedback and changing the course to fit needs/interests. I learned a lot of raw material and theory that will no doubt be valuable as I continue to learn and discuss biology. I liked that we centered applying theory to our interests. The oral exams were a cool component that I found valuable and educational in and of themselves.

Andrew works really hard to make the class exciting and is open to feedback and changing the course to fit needs/interests. I learned a lot of raw material and theory that will no doubt be valuable as I continue to learn and discuss biology. I liked that we centered applying theory to our interests. The oral exams were a cool compone …Read more

The material in this course was very interesting, and the professor lectured in a way that made it understandable. No exams but a big project at the end that you do with a partner. Problem sets every week or so, but they weren't too bad.