PBL is problem based learning and essentially what Dr. M does on exams is that she will often give us a question with a situation we have never seen before and expect us to use the little bio knowledge we have to try and answer the question. we just had an exam on hormones and she gave us a multistep problem on stress response which she literally covered in like 5 minutes in lecture. for some people the approach works great for them, for others like myself I would rather be in your standard bio lecture course regurgitating facts like the bio course over at Barnard which has gotten rave reviews, but we HAVE to take bio with Dr. M and that's what pisses a lot of people off because if you don't like her lecture and exam style, you're screwed. And the grading scheme is pretty messed up, the mean is scaled to about a B/B- and even getting the mean on the exams does not guarantee you a good grade and they curve is weird. and last semester there was an issue with cheating (rumor is there was a cheating ring where exams were being stolen/circulated) which drove up all of our means and Dr. M did address the issue but I'm sure people still cheat because that's how desperate some people are to pass her course.
her exams can be pretty random and there are no real predictable patterns as to what you'll get asked on the exam. oh and she likes to have like 4 questions revolve around one topic so if you get one question wrong, you will just propagate the error and the TAs are not forgiving so misunderstanding a question totally throws off your entire exam since you'll f*ck up all other parts of the test. and the TAs are all or nothing with points, partial credit is rare and sometimes you can get a question right but they won't like you're reasoning and still take off a lot of points.
