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The purpose of the presented article is to evaluate the students' perception of the online teaching educational model as a part of the "Biochemistry with Elements of Chemistry" course conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic at the Faculty of Medicine of the Jagiellonian University Medical College. The first part of the article reflects upon the pandemic impact on the transition from the in-person (standard format) to a complete remote learning format. The next part is based on the responses of the students to a questionnaire and presents an analysis of the students' preferences and perceptions regarding synchronous and asynchronous teaching methods. Students answered questions about the advantages and disadvantages of distance learning programs. They indicated the most suitable learning mode in terms of gaining knowledge and enhancing their motivation to learn. They listed factors that facilitated remote learning as well as those which made it difficult and posed a challenge to adjust to the new system, in all types of classes, that is, lectures, seminars, and laboratories. The last part of this paper presents the results of the students' performance in the pandemic-enforced system and compares them with the results from the previous class of students from the past year, when teaching was conducted mainly in the standard format. The conclusions from the given analysis may enable beneficial changes for the "Biochemistry with Elements of Chemistry" course for remote teaching in the future. It may also provide valuable insights for such types of courses conducted at other Universities and promote deliberations to continuously improve learning outcomes.

In the recently published article by Koza et al. (SAGE Open, 2023, 13, doi: 10.1177/21582440231177974), the authors analyzed the academic promotion system in Poland between 2011 and 2020. They concluded that "the Polish system of academic promotions in the past decade can hardly be regarded as based on pure merit", suggesting the impropriety, based on the participance of the members of the Central Board for Degrees and Titles in panels of experts evaluating the applications. Biochemistry was provided as a research discipline in which such an "impropriety" was the most pronounced, though other disciplines were only slightly less "improperly affected". Although the calculations presented by Koza and others (Koza et al., 2023) were proper, their conclusions were affected by fundamental errors in assessing the roles of the panelists and misinterpretation of the data. The drawbacks of the interpretations of the facts and in drawing conclusions are presented and discussed in this paper, underlining the necessity of being very careful when assessing any phenomenon and concluding about any mechanism. Indeed, only very well substantiated conclusions, strongly supported by objective data, should be published. This rule is very well known in biochemistry and other exact and natural sciences, and should be mandatory in all other research disciplines.