Perrine, John  

Dr. Perrine is great! He's funny and his tests are pretty easy if you study well!

Dr. Perrine is very personable and his lectures are hilarious because he throws in so many great jokes. His tests are very comprehensive so it is not enough to memorize the material, you need to really understand it and be able to apply it to other situations (which he tells you on the first day of class). The only homework is an online quiz once a week that really helps to understand the material. Overall a great professor!

Perrine is definitely a teacher to get! BIO 160 was a new course this year and it was a pretty boring class, but he made it interesting and easy to learn! He was always very on top of things and he was good about grades and study guides. He is a very low-stress kind of teacher, and he made it very nice to transition into college first quarter freshman year.

Dr. Perrine is an excellent teacher. He cuts out all of the irrelevant stuff you don't need to know so that you can focus on what you do have to know. He presents the material in a way that is easy to comprehend, and then the tests are easy as long as you've paid attention and done the reading, which is also very easy. I definitely recommend him.

Dr. Perrine was a cool dude, Bio 160 is not a super interesting class, but it mostly involves memorization and doing simple labs. He is a fair grader, just show up with your iclicker and do the masteringbio and it's pretty straightforward.

Perrine is a very dynamic teacher. Keeps students entertained with witty remarks, lectures are entertaining, and is clearly very knowledgeable. However, his midterms are not easy. They are multiple choice but they require you to study EVERYTHING so take good notes of things he says during lecture. Merely studying the slides is not enough. Attend class for the entertainment, but don't forget to study and take notes.

Honestly he is a great professor. The class was rough for me due to having two other very challenging classes to focus on. He had another professor present material sometimes and this other guy did not do too good of a job. If you go to class and take notes on the material he presents and just study it well you can easily get a B if not an A. Great guy!

Literally the greatest professor ever. He makes this GE course so much fun and very interesting! At first, it seems like a lot of information, but if you review his power points and review for the quizzes, you're golden. Also, if you go to his office hours he is SO helpful and clarifies a lot so I highly recommend going to those. If you need to take a science without a lab to fulfill one of your GE's, I recommend this class with Perrine, 110%!

Perrine is awesome. On the first day he told us he realizes it is a GE and he isn't going to kill us. Lectures are funny and low pressure and Perrine knows the material very well. TAKE THIS CLASS.

Perrine is pretty chill. He will definitely throw some sarcasm your way, which caught my interest right from the get go. BIO 327 repeats a TON of information from the intro bio courses, which I still had fresh in my head as a 2nd year. Therefore, if you're a 3rd or 4th year, the class content might get incredibly boring at times, but Perrine does at least make it more interesting. Take good notes!!! He can rush through his Power Point lecture at times. I also strongly recommend making flashcards for the key terms he will post online before the midterm and the final; it helped me get an A in the course. A lot of people bombed the midterm because they didn't take this class super seriously. It can seem like a joke at times, but don't treat it like one! Also, make sure to do the online homework before any quizzes. Additionally, if you have to read an article before a quiz, ALWAYS CHECK THE TITLE OF THE ONE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW! There was a time where the most recent article he had posted wasn't the one he quizzed us on. Finally, don't stress about lab. Just show up and do what you need to; it was probably the most chill lab I'll ever have. Good luck!

I honestly don't know why Perrine has such a high polyrating score. Yeah he seems like a cool guy and is pretty funny and entertaining but as a professor he is seriously lacking. It's week 10 and we have no idea what our grades are in the class because he has yet to return an assignment to us and give us a grade. And this is his only class this quarter, and its not a big class! It took him 3 weeks to grade our midterm, which he told us he made more difficult this quarter (all free response, short answer, essay, etc.; most people did not finish on time) and then got angry at the class because people did not do well overall. His powerpoints are pointless, you have to go to class and write down everything he says because when he gives you the test material to study, half of it won't be on his powerpoints at all. The material is not necessarily difficult to understand, a lot is review, but the way he words questions will confuse the hell out of you so be prepared. Lab reports are also excessive and take time and effort and you won't know how you're doing on them because he apparently doesn't grade them until finals week? As a graduating senior I took this class because it seemed interesting and Perrine seemed like a great professor and I am extremely disappointed that I'm taking his final in a week with no idea what my grade is.

Dr. Perrine is awesome. He makes the class interesting and he’s hilarious. He’s also very easy going and easy to talk to. His lectures are very straightforward as to what you’re going to be tested on. The reading can be harder to differentiate as to what will be on the tests but he doesn’t include very many reading questions on the exams. I knew people that didn’t do any of the readings and did well on all exams. The course consists of online quizzes that cover the readings, a handful of homework assignments (that you can get full credit for by following the instructions to a T and actually going into sufficient detail instead of treating it like busy work), 2 midterms, and a final. The midterms consist of multiple choice, short answer, and matching/defining a term (based on a description).

This class was fascinating! I thought lecture was engaging, and the topics covered were interesting. The one thing that is really important to know is that the PowerPoint slides posted online are not much use. He says a lot more than is written, and often the material needed to study for exams is in what he says. My personal suggestion is to record lecture, and take notes as quickly as you can. At least if you miss something, you can go back and re-listen to it if needed. He does provide a study guide, which he very clearly states (when someone asks about a topic) that if it wasn’t listed on the study guide, then you don’t need to know it. Exams were multiple choice and short answer. As a person, I wouldn’t go to him if you were looking for sympathy, but as a lecturer and grader, a good choice. He has definitely been the best lecturer I have had a Cal Poly. The one downside to this class, the final in our quarter was 45%. Apparently he increased it from the previous quarter. Not sure if it will stay that way or not.

My experience with Dr. Perrine was frustrating to say the least. I realized that I might be slightly biased because I am not very interested in ecology, but Dr. Perrine was not a good instructor. The first very annoying thing that Dr. Perrine did was never ever respond to emails. I emailed him several times throughout the quarter, often way advance as a courtesy, and he never EVER responded to one of my emails. Not even a week late. Once I emailed him several days in advance to ask if he would be willing to meet with me for a meer 15 minutes to go over my first exam and he never responded. So I ended up having to take the second mid term without even getting a chance to look at the first. I work part time on top of school and there was no way I could have made it to any of his office hours. The least he could do was tell me he wasn't available. Dr. Perrine also constantly told us before exams that he would not ask us trivial factoids but instead ask us the most important overarching concepts. He was extremely inconsistent in his follow through with this. On the first exam especially he asked us incredibly trivial information from the readings and didn't even mention several concepts that he talked about for a long time during lecture. He also makes us do an absurd amount of reading. He expects that everyone put in an incredible amount of time and effort despite clearly knowing that most biology majors take this class alongside the anatomy and physiology classes which take up a HUGE amount of time. Perrine could easily get all of his points across and teach us the most important things in ecology without assigning so much reading. This also applies to the homework assignments which were incredibly involved and multiple pages long, all of which took me significant time and that didn't really help me understand the concepts from lecture. He also takes FOREVER to grade things. He took him 3 weeks to grade out first mid term and so by the time we all took the second mid term none of us knew how we did and if our method of studying worked. Same thing with the second mid term. He entered the grades for it with only a week to go before the final. I also didn't really care for his attitude. He constantly swears in class which wasn't that offensive but is just not professional behavior in a university classroom. He also said some very off color comments about cancer and just seems pretty unaware of his students feelings. Once he talked about cancer like getting cancer and dieing was funny. If I had a relative or if I was affected by cancer in any way I probably would have been really offended. Overall, he really just gave off the vibe that he didn't care about us. He even joked about how stressed we probably all are during dead week. The one positive thing I will say is that he did give us a study guide for each mid term which not every professor does, but overall my experience was still negative.

What else is there to say? Fine person, nothing interesting. Class was meh... Blah, blah, blah... Fine person.