Meredith Jackrel

Bio faculty cannot teach. Reading off of ppts is not teaching. Get the ppts, do the reading, and get old tests and you will do fine. I am not prepping for mcat and I am having to actually learn the material. So frustrating.

1/20/2025

Biochemistry should be an interesting topic covering many materials essential for students' future careers. However, Jackrel and Pakrasi made this interesting class a terrible mess. The lectures are poorly organized. Unclear criteria grade problem sets. Exams contain topics not discussed during the lectures. Pretty annoying.

12/28/2023

The class is super interesting and employs a really nice focus on structure to help in understanding everything else. Although her lectures are not the most engaging, she really does care about her students and wants them to succeed. The exams are graded fairly, although they are definitely not the easiest. Go to class if you want to do well here.

12/28/2022

This has been the absolute WORSE class I have ever taken at WashU. Jackrel's lectures are dry and boring. She quite literally reads off of slides. The practice material for the exam is not indicative of what will be on the exam at all. She chooses things mentioned VERY briefly to put of the exam, forcing you to memorize the hundreds of slides.

12/22/2022

EXTREMELY unclear grading criteria and very harsh. Doesn't seem to care about her students at all and wants them to fail. Reads off lecture slides so attendance is useless. Things that are not covered in class are often on exams. Even if you memorize all the slides, her questions are so irrelevant that you don't even know what she's asking for.

12/22/2022

She is accessible outside of class, which was nice. She cares about her students, but not about their success in the course. The exams are very difficult and there is no set expectation for how to do well. The answer keys are very detailed, so you must memorize everything. She also reads directly off of the slides, so going to lecture is pointless.

12/15/2022

I really enjoyed this class. Not really sure why there are thes ratings. Lectures were interesting with a lot of questions that we discussed with each other during class. Exams are a mix- some simple memorization, but some problems are a little tricky. The problem sets are long, but give a lot of practice for the tests. Replies to emails quickly.

11/9/2022

reads off lecture slides and doesn't really provide much detail into concepts. grade is determined by very few assignments (70% exams) so there's not much opportunity to do better. unclear grading criteria, doesn't provide enough practice problems, and thus there's no way to expect what to see on exams.

10/30/2022

BIOCHEM 1: She is bad at lectures and presenting content, so her test questions may seem irrelevant. However, she is a generous grader and often curves the final grades to have 30% of the class obtain As and the majority of the class obtain Bs. Some obtain Cs, and she does everything she can to help students not get anything lower than that.

1/11/2021

Her lectures are dry and reading off of powerpoints and not much accommodations are given. Even though students are struggling, she doesn't care that much.

12/16/2020

Horrible class and professor. Gives very little feedback, and we have no idea what her expectations are. Terrible exams. I would say terrible lectures, but they are videos of Jackrel reading from PPT slides from a couple of years ago. Worst professor at WU.

12/14/2020

Lectures were sometimes a bit dense with material, but it's a 400 level class. At office hours she was really helpful and gave great explanations. Do the problem sets- they help with big concepts. She spent an hour outside of office hours going through an exam I had trouble with- really helped for the final.

1/25/2019

Lectures can be best described as her reading off slides full of text. She didn't post her own practice exams but rather the exams made by the old professor , which were of no use because her exams were significantly different. Also, on one occasion she posted exam material less than 24 hours before the exam with no answer key.

1/24/2019

I found Biochemistry to be one of the best classes I have taken at WashU! The material was very interesting and presented well, with a focus on concepts rather than details. I found the slides to be very useful. There was enough detail provided that I could listen to the lectures and just add a few notes. Really helpful prof outside of class.

12/20/2018

Her lectures were honestly the most boring 3 hours of every week. She just read through 50 slides per class without any sort of inflection so it was very difficult to pay attention. The best way to learn the material was to re-watch the lectures on fast-forward. There was a perverse amount of information to memorize and you had to teach yourself.

12/18/2018