Mailund on the Internet

Today we (Carsten Wiuf and myself) held the exams for our Systems Biology class. This is the first time we teach this class, so we weren’t quite sure how to evaluate it.

The class was a theoretical introduction to systems biology — the full name of the class is Mathematical Models in Systems Biology – and we have covered some simple ODE modelling of systems, some stochastic modelling using stochastic Petri nets and implemented bits and pieces in R.

To test that our students knew how to do all three, we wanted to cover all three at the exam, so we did the following: each student got a small system to model, both deterministically as ODEs and stochastic as SPNs, and then they should explain what the system did (qualitatively, at least) and finally show that it behaved the predicted way by implementing it.

All in all I think it went pretty well.

I’ve made some statistics on the grades in the two courses I’ve taught this term. They do not exactly match the “expected distribution” according to the rules about our new grading system, but I am not quite sure how to react to that. Either I am just being too nice at the exam, or otherwise the students have just met the requirements better than the rules would suggest…

Genome analysis

String algorithms

We have just completed the exams for genome analysis. Half the students decided not to show up, but of those who did show up, the vast majority got top grades. This is telling me that we did something wrong with the course.

If only half the people show up, and no one manage to get an average grade, it is telling me that we have made the class too hard. Since the average grades are missing, bets are that it is the people who would normally get those who decided to give up all together.

I haven’t been too happy with this class myself. We didn’t structure it that well and we probably included too much in each particular topic.

I hope we can do it better next time.