BIOL 365Methods in Bioinformatics

68% liked it54% easy77% useful

From 25 ratings and 7 comments on UW Flow. The most helpful comments, quoted as written, without names. Read them all on UW Flow.

• Poorly structured course. The lectures were confusing and the slides were not helpful when studying. Dr. McConkey is a very smart guy who clearly has lots of experience in bioinformatics, but his experience doesn't translate very well to teaching. He spent lots of time on things we weren't tested on, but glossed over things that were worth 15 marks on the final. Final was absolutely brutal.
  That being said, the course content I did manage to get into my head during this course (mostly thanks to studying in a group) was very relevant and applicable when I did a co-op job in bioinformatics.

  Jul 2019 · didn’t like it · 1 found this helpfulOn UW FlowRemove this

• AVOID THIS COURSE. The prof is SUPER lazy. He barely gets assignments out on time, let alone get them back to you marked. Will mumble through each lecture and will himself not understand what he wants you to know. The content would be useful if he taught it effectively. The main reason why I took this course is because I wanted to learn how to use R to analyze data. Unfortunately, he gives you the R script for the assignments, so you do not get to learn that. Also, the final is 5 20 mark long answer questions. Saying this as he did not say this in class. Many people were very blind sided.

  May 2019 · didn’t like it · 1 found this helpfulOn UW FlowRemove this

• This course won me over. As a biochem student, I'm not naturally engaged by computational science - I took it because I wanted to improve my computer literacy, and since bioinformatics are a good skillset for any scientist to have.
  Buuut I actually loved the course. It's surprisingly useful and relevant to my other courses and coops, and it's great to have a formal introduction to a whole plethora of databases/analysis websites. I was worried to find out that the rest of the class is in computational biology, but any programming that you do for the course has tutorials along with it, so it's not a big deal if you have zero experience like me.
  I found the first unit or two a bit dry…

  Mar 2017 · liked it · 1 found this helpfulOn UW FlowRemove this

• This course is relatively light. The assignments are too few and too infrequent to really be a major source of learning or assessment. It's fairly reasonable to get 100% on all of the assignments. The major issue were the exams, which most people were unprepared for but were incredibly reasonable. This was very memorization heavy, and would benefit from a more challenging set of assessments and a greater focus on the applications and not just memorization.

  May 2026 · liked itOn UW FlowRemove this

• An interesting course that touched upon different bioinformatics topics. The lab component focused on the use of R and its applications in gene finding and phylogenetic analysis. There was also a lot of time put into understanding the NCBI both in the lectures and in the lab. Some of the lecture topics included databases, sequence alignments, BLAST, phylogeny, and gene expression. The midterm for this offering of the course was an online LEARN quiz, that consisted of 10 multiple-choice questions and the rest were short answer questions. However, the final exam was in-person and covered all the material taught in the course.

  May 2024 · liked itOn UW FlowRemove this