Reviews of professor Benjamin Blackman

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 4.0/5
He is a good lecturer and super knowledgeable, but the material covered in class is a bit overwhelming. There is a lot of new ideas, vocabulary, and life cycles presented in a short amount of time and then expected to be remembered by us. I think this part was a bit unfair, but idk who dictates what he presents, himself or bio1b organizers.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Professor Blackman's lectures contain a lot of information but his topic handouts and slides are very helpful in learning the material. He provides key terms and learning outcomes for each lecture which are very useful when studying for the midterm. I focused on the key terms and learning outcomes while studying for his midterm and got a 99%.

Rating: 3.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
A great lecturer with an interesting topic (organismal biology). The downside is mainly with exams and quantity of memorization to accomplish. His midterm def blindsided me (+ the class, going by the average), but at least the final exam can replace it. GL

Rating: 5.0/5, difficulty: 1.0/5
Professor Blackman made ENL3 one of my favorite classes at UC Davis. He's a great lecturer and great guy overall; he really cares about you succeeding. Make sure you do the reading (after all, it IS an ENGLISH class), because he has weekly pop quizzes. Quizzes are only 5 short answers. You also do one discussion post a week and finally a final.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
So much content. He taught the organismal portion and there were 60 pages of google docs worth of notes, which was twice as much as the 30 pages I wrote each for evolution and ecology. Besides the heavy content, basically anything he said during lecture was fair game. I had to watch over the lectures and couldn't speed it up much.

Rating: 4.0/5, difficulty: 3.0/5
Prof Blackman has a great sense of humor and I liked how casual the class felt. U have to speak up in this class to do well. Some weeks had a lot of reading so be prepared for that. The discussions in class helped a lot with comprehension. He is a tough grader& since you're graded mostly on papers, it's hard to get an A if u aren't a great writer.

Rating: 2.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
Very involved and caring professor but he is ridiculously bad at question writing. Way too much material is covered and not properly explained during lecture and everyone was appalled by his midterm. He will say something once and then ask a super specific question about it on the test.

Rating: 1.0/5, difficulty: 5.0/5
He's a nice guy and cares about plant biology, except no one else does. He introduces tons of term each lecture without defining them and expects students to have amazing understanding of each term (even if it's not actually explained). Avgs are in the Ds. This unit brought my grade down from an A to an A-, so beware. My study guide was 30 pgs.