Sally Pasion

Dr. Pasion's class is a steady, cohesive, and informative seminar on essentially replication, transcription, and translation. There is also a lot of adjunct information on replication, transcription...well, you get the idea. Included with this holy trinity of rep/transc/transl are various horrible diseases that malfunctions in this cellular trio cause and certain biotechnological techniques to characterize it all, along with some scientific papers to analyze and report on. Dr. Pasion takes roll a lot and does other little things to try and give a person ways to earn extra credit in this fairly challenging upper division course. The class seems curved, so if you try, and show that you're trying to try, she'll give you the benefit of a doubt.

Homework: There were two very easy take-home problem sets for the whole semester that were basically extra credit.

Tests: The tests are hard! They are part multiple choice, part short/long answer. You better know the material, seriously. The true false questions said to explain only if the answer was false; all the answers were false. The good news is that the tests are taken from Dr. Pasion's lecture notes, which are also Power Point documents that you can download on BlackBoard: you just have to know the information on the Power Point notes and you're there. Absorbing this information will have to be your own labor of love however. More good news is that the final was not comprehensive.

Projects: There were three scientific papers we had to analyze and critique. You have to read the whole paper and synopsize it in one, double spaced page: to distill it down to it's simple, essential meaning. There was also one semester-end paper that you get to choose which you do a three page, double spaced analysis of. These were fairly challenging, but again, a way to tack on take-home points if you're sliding on the tests or attendance. The bad news was we had to do group presentations as a part of the analysis of two of the papers.

Dr. Passion was able to deliver this dry load of material with grace, thoroughness, and consistency. She comes off as a little nervous or keyed up sometimes, but she's obviously an energetic person. She always treated everyone with respect and courtesy, even when she clearly wanted to forge ahead and finish the material. She always answered all my e-mail queries.