How to pass BIOL 1107 and BIOL 1108 at UGA

If you’re reading this in week three because the first exam grades just came out, you have a lot of company. BIOL 1107 and 1108 are the gateway sequence at UGA for biology, ecology, biochemistry, microbiology and genetics, and for the pre-medicine, pre-PT, pre-PA, pre-vet and pre-dental tracks. Thousands of students take them every year. They work as a filter, though UGA doesn’t mean them to: the courses assume a kind of preparation that high school AP Biology doesn’t always give.

What BIOL 1107 and 1108 cover

BIOL 1107 (Principles of Biology I) is about information flow and evolution. The major units:

• Macromolecules and the chemistry of life
• Cell structure and the endomembrane system
• DNA replication, transcription, and translation (the central dogma)
• Cell division (mitosis and meiosis)
• Mendelian and molecular genetics
• Population genetics and evolutionary mechanisms

BIOL 1108 (Principles of Biology II) usually covers organismal biology, physiology and ecology: the diversity of life, plant and animal systems, and ecological dynamics. The thinking shifts from molecular reasoning in 1107 to fitting whole systems together in 1108.

Both courses require co-enrollment in a lab (BIOL 1107L and 1108L), which has its own grade and uses TopHat and post-lab assignments. The lab is separate credit, but the workload is similar.

Why students struggle

Most of the points students lose in BIOL 1107 come from a format mismatch. AP Biology rewards vocabulary and recall. BIOL 1107 rewards applying concepts to situations you haven’t seen, reading data, and reasoning from first principles. If flashcards are your whole method, you’ll stall in the C range however many hours you put in.

Where the points go:

1. Exam questions are built on scenarios. A typical one gives you an experiment you’ve never seen, a graph you’ve never looked at, or a mutation you never studied, and asks you to reason out what happens using principles from class.
2. The pace doesn’t let up. Most professors cover one major topic a week. Fall two weeks behind and you’re effectively ten percentage points behind on the next exam.
3. TopHat attendance adds up. Most BIOL 1107 sections use it for in-class participation questions, and missing class quietly takes 5 to 10 points off your final grade.
4. The lab is its own animal. Reports are graded on the quality of the scientific writing as well as on the conclusions. Students who treat lab as a side task often watch it pull their overall biology GPA down half a letter.
5. Retakes don’t erase grades. UGA doesn’t replace the grade on a repeated course; both attempts count in your GPA. Avoiding a bad grade is worth far more than recovering from one.

The exam structure most professors use

It varies by instructor, but a BIOL 1107 section usually has this shape:

• 4 to 5 unit exams across the semester, each covering one major content block
• A non-cumulative final or a partially cumulative final
• TopHat or in-class participation worth 5 to 15% of the grade
• Pre-class assignments or homework worth 10 to 15%
• Optional extra credit, often through office-hour attendance or supplemental assignments

Most sections aren’t curved. The syllabus lays out the grading contract, and that’s what you’re held to.

If your first BIOL 1107 exam didn’t go the way you planned, the next two weeks decide the semester, and that’s when diagnostic tutoring does the most good. Book a BIOL Diagnostic →

How to study for it

The students who earn A’s in BIOL 1107 semester after semester do four things:

1. Use active recall on the concepts, not only the terms. After each lecture, close your notes and explain the day’s material out loud as if you were teaching a friend. If you have to check your notes to get through it, you don’t know it yet. Flashcards are fine for vocabulary. They won’t get you through “explain why a frameshift mutation is more disruptive than a missense mutation.”

2. Work practice problems before review sessions. Rereading notes makes you feel ready; then the exam hands you a new scenario and you freeze. Problems show you the distance between recognizing the material and using it. Use the end-of-chapter problems, the professor’s old exams if you can get them, and whatever practice the course provides.

3. Draw the central dogma from memory every week. If you can draw DNA → mRNA → protein with every enzyme, location, direction and regulatory point labeled, without looking, a good share of the exam is already done. Nothing else in 1107 pays back as much for the time.

4. Treat lab like a writing course. Read the rubric before you write the report, not after. The introduction needs a clear hypothesis, and the discussion needs to tie results to mechanism. Reports written the night before lose 15 to 20 points on writing quality alone.

What to do when you’ve already had a bad first exam

If you scored below a 70 on the first exam, this is the way back:

• Work out what you need on the remaining exams to reach your target grade. Don’t guess. The numbers usually show that steady B+ work gets you there, which feels very different from “I need to be perfect.”
• Sort your mistakes. Were they conceptual, careless, or from time pressure? Each needs a different fix.
• Change how you study in the next week, not the next month. The longer you wait, the steeper the climb.
• If the new method isn’t paying off by exam two, get outside help. Diagnostic-first tutoring, which starts by finding what’s missing, usually does more than “more hours of the same thing.”

How BIOL 1107/1108 connects to pre-health and scholarships

BIOL 1107 and 1108 are required for almost every pre-health track at UGA, and they go straight into the prerequisite GPA on medical, dental, PA, PT and vet school applications. A B- here costs you more than a B- in an elective. The full prerequisite map is in the UGA Pre-Med Prerequisites guide.

They’re also approved STEM weighted courses for HOPE and Zell Miller, so a B, C or D gets a 0.5 boost in your calculated HOPE GPA. The HOPE and Zell Miller GPA guide covers how that works, and if you’ve already lost the scholarship, the Zell Miller recovery guide covers what to do next.

When to get help

If you’ve changed how you study, given it two weeks, and your practice-problem scores still haven’t moved, the gap is usually structural: a missing piece of foundation, not a shortage of effort. At that point a tutor who can find the specific bottleneck will save you more time than a third week on your own. I work diagnostic-first. I find the gap before I prescribe anything, so the tutoring goes to what’s broken and not to what already works.