It’s been what, 10 years since the last time I took a test in college? Well, I’ve had two for Molecular Genetics now, and one for Limnology. I’ve been stressing so hard about these exams, and I haven’t gotten the grade back from Limnology yet (though I think I did fine)…but the two grades from MolGen, the class I was dreading most, have been excellent. I got a straight 100 on the first one, and I just found out I got a 96 on the second one.
Turns out Molecular Genetics, like all advanced sorts of chemistry, is highly visual in nature. If you can envision how proteins fold and how molecules orient in space, you’re golden…and that, I must say, has always been a strength of mine in terms of organic chemistry.
And get this: we spend four class periods going into great detail the regulation of transcription by RNA polymerase II. We went into enhancer binding proteins, phosphorylation of the COOH end, ALL of the TF_II transcription factors, their molecular structures, their chemical roles and binding sites, the acetylation of RNA via HAT, etc. EVERYTHING.
We spend 5 minutes, tops, going over RNA Poly I and Poly III. Five damn minutes.
Guess what.
Nearly 20% of the test was on Poly I and Poly III, and the types of RNA they produce. Drives me nuts. Thank god I happened upon that material about 10 minutes before the test and committed it to memory, or else this whole thing would’ve been a different story.
I can’t really get my head round the idea of an Ogre sounding like such a happy chappie - more of a jolly green giant, perhaps, but very well done! I dunno what any of your subject description means but I do know how scared I get if I think of returning to education after a long time.
Congratulations!
In defense of your professor, most molecular biology courses or educational programs really come down to this at some level. It’s important that people learn the fundamentals of how proteins structure, bind, interact, etc., but there are so many proteins and cellular machinery mechanisms out there that ultimately it’s impossible to discuss the same level of detail for each molecule. So, you go through a few in excruciating detail to understand some of the principles of molecular biology and then skim through the other “important” ones so that you’ll have some chance of understanding the role of a particular protein in the bigger picture after being introduced to it in a 6 page paper.
Yes, yes, I understand all that. And I have no trouble with the overall concept in terms of the larger picture, but really now, if you’re going to test someone on specific material, for God’s sake, make your test representative of the work you did to get to that point. That’s all I ask.
