While the material is interesting, and Dr. Lipman is very passionate, I would not recommend that you take this class unless you have to. My TA opened the first day of discussion by saying "Don't worry if I take a few points off of you homework, since most people lose points on the midterm!" I do not understand how this was supposed to be comforting, all I heard was that I am going to lose points on the homework AND the midterm. I do not feel that Dr. Lipman cares about her students' success. She will not record anything, including class and the review sessions. Considering I have work during the review sessions, I found this to be very annoying. Dr. Grether, who taught the first half of the class, recorded his. Dr. Lipman is so scared of getting in trouble with the university for teaching what she is paid to teach, that she refuses to record anything so that there can be no proof of her teaching us.

Additionally, the grading for this class was SO strict that it really upset me. And I am not a nerd who needs to get an A or else I crash out. All I ask is fair grading. The homework asks you to answer a series of questions in 1-2 sentences. However, if you do not describe everything in depth, you will get points off. I would use a term like "biodiversity" in my 2 sentences, and I would get a point taken off for not describing what this concept is. I think this is ridiculous, since my homework is being graded by a TA getting their PhD in ecology... and I ONLY HAVE TWO SENTENCES! And if your homework is longer than a page, you get points taken off too. It's like you cannot win.

I think this class for Lipman is more about wanting to flaunt her research than to help students learn and succeed. She wants to trick you and test tiny details instead of working with you to help you succeed.

This class was incredibly poorly organized. All grades took absolutely ages to be returned, so it was impossible to know where you really stood in the class. Lectures were adjacent to actual torture, as Gorlitsky and ESPECIALLY Lipman were plain boring and awful lecturers. The content had its interesting moments, especially in the animal behavior portion of the class, but this was compromised by the awful attempts to teach made by both professors. The professors realize no one would come to lecture unless they sporadically assigned quizzes, so this was done to maintain participation, although if you looked around the room it was clear everyone was preoccupied with anything else more stimulating and important to them. Please do not take this class unless you want to be permanently turned off to animal biology and ecology. Had an absolutely revolting experience.

Seriously the worst class I have ever taken. The TAs will take off points for absolutely random things. AND I MEAN RANDOM. They clearly are just trying to meet a quota and that honestly just makes the authenticity of the class go way down. Everyone agreed that the exams were super vague and worded weirdly. There were probably about 10 questions on each exam that could have multiple correct answers depending on your reasoning. I met with a TA one time to discuss exam answers and even she couldn’t give me a logical reason as to why my answers were incorrect. Dr. Lipman and Gorlitsky… do better

TLDR; Don't take this class because of mandatory attendance (not recorded), poorly written multiple choice exams, and weekly assignments that are near impossible to get 10/10 on.

This class is an unnecessary time sink that will require a disproportionate amount of effort to succeed in compared to other classes. For instance, I took this class at the same time as CHEM 153A and found that I was spending WAY more time on EEB 100. If you are able to take literally any other class, I would choose it. The professors do not post their lectures which is crazy because they expect you to remember every little detail for the midterm and final. They had multiple test questions that referenced a singular sentence from a YouTube video shown in class.

There is absolutely 0 indication as to what is important to study for the exams. You essentially have to memorize the course which is especially difficult to do when it is not recorded. The PowerPoints lack the necessary detail to succeed and the practice exams are far easier than the actual tests which are worth 60 PERCENT of your final grade.

In addition to this, the TAs were super nitpicky about the weekly assignments. They were literally taking off 10% of our weekly assignment grades for not including a hyperlink in a pdf document in addition to their wildly inconsistent grading scheme.

So, if you have the choice DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS. However, if you have to take this class then you better be prepared to go to every lecture and take really good notes.

I took this course with professor Gregory grether and Lipman.

Overall view of the class:
I think that the concepts were engaging and interesting and there wasn’t a lot of work to do for the class. For discussion you only had a weekly reading that came with a summary and 1 presentation. But it was annoying because you can almost never get a 100 on the homework and they take off points for the most dumb thing like not putting your name, the title of the reading, the TA’s are very nit picky. I had Joey as a TA and he would never give 100 and would take off points for anything he was also harsh on grading presentations. Basically it’s very hard to get an A for this class, the class average this quarter was 85% and BEWARE they do not round up grades. Even if you are very close they say they do not round, so whatever you get is your grade period !

Gregory Grether :
His lectures were so boring ! I had to fight my sleep ! He would talk to fast and I feel like I couldn’t take notes as quick but he had recordings which helped. His quizzes were online and must be completed in an hour, which was graded for accuracy. The quizzes were not that simple, I feel like you had to understand the concepts and I feel like the way he explained things just made it way more complicated. The best TA that helped explain things was Maddy. But besides that the midterm was not that bad, I feel like he mostly teaches about concepts rather than definitions. But the way I studied was mostly by definitions. And I got a B on the midterm. Overall, boring lecturer but his midterm was not that bad.

On the other hand…

Lipman: she was a very engaging professor, she asked questions and accepted participation. So I didn’t want to fall asleep in her class. But what I hated was that she would take more participation time rather than thoroughly going over concepts. Not only that but she would not record lectures so you have to go to class and she would have pop quizzes that would be turned in to the TA some Time during class so you have to make sure to go. Good thing the quizzes were not graded on accuracy but more on participation. But because she wouldn’t record it would be hard to keep up with the material since I feel like she mostly used pictures as her slides. Not only that but I feel like her exam was way harder than the animal behavior portion. Something I did not expect in the final was the fact that she had questions related to the videos she would show in class so try and pay attention to the main point in the videos she shows in class. Overall, she was not the best professor when it came to explaining content.

Lipman was an overall pretty okay professor. Compared to Dr.Gorlitsky, her lectures were a bit lower energy, had fewer videos, and were often very slow. The slides were also weirdly formatted but contained most of the information that you would need for the exam. It would help if you still showed up to the lecture since they do pop quizzes based on participation to check for attendance. Her exam which only tested the last 5 weeks' ecology portion of the class was very hard compared to her practice exams and the sample questions that she had in her slides. If you study and pay attention to some of the important concepts and know how to apply them in the slides and her lectures, you should get by just fine. The workload each week was very manageable where you had to read one research paper each week and answer some questions. However, depending on the TA or grader, they can be kind of picky with the grading. For the ecology part, the concepts are a bit easier, especially if you took LS30A/B, but the exam is def harder than the animal behavior part with Gorlitsky.

The content was interesting but participation and attendance was required for every single discussion section. Exams were difficult and no answer keys were given out after receiving grades. I am selling my 80+ pages typed-up notes for both the ecology and animal behavior sections, my email is L*************.

Lipman gives very engaging lectures. Some people found the tests tricky, but it is because you have to remember some vocab and be able to apply it to different situations. She is overall a good professor.

She is never sure and confident in a subject she teaches and when you ask her a question she doesn’t give you a straight forward answer! I just feel like her class is tricky to take and she gives ambiguous questions

Definitely not the best professor I've had. On the very first day of class with her, she gave us an introductory presentation explaining what we should expect for the class, what we would learn, etc...Then, she gave a whole speech about why we should not email her, and, if we do have any urging questions, to email X, Y, and Z because she does not want to receive emails from anyone. I've never had a professor not want to engage with their students through email, so that didn't sit right with me, especially given the fact that this class was taught during Covid so an email is one of the only ways you can contact a professor outside of class. If you find emails from students to be annoying or a burden, then maybe you're in the wrong profession.
As some other people have said in the reviews, her lectures are not very engaging. She won't shy away from talking about her own research during class, and she will throw in a theoretical question about it on the final. Her questions on the final exam were definitely too ambiguous. I know some professors have purposely made their tests harder during Covid since everything is online, but the questions absolutely could have been written better while still being challenging. What was most off-putting about her was her response to the frustration many students expressed because of the final exam questions. I believe one of her multiple-choice questions had two correct answers but only one of them was counted for credit. After many students contacted her about it, she finally gave in and awarded credit for those who selected either answer and then stubbornly claimed that her answer choice for that question was still the only right answer despite the fact that a research article she assigned to our discussion sections said otherwise. It was very obvious that she made a mistake but was not willing to admit that she was wrong. She then grew increasingly annoyed with the response from students and refused to answer anyone else's questions about the final, finalized our grades, and called it a day. Actually, she didn't respond to anyone for a good week after the final. She took the liberty of having an earlier spring break. Then, she came back saying she would not respond to students because of the large influx of emails she received about the final and that was that.

So far in my time at UCLA, I have learned there are two kinds of professors--those that actually care about their students and others who don't necessarily care about the teaching aspect but took the job for the great career opportunity and to perform their beloved research. I'm more pissed that this is not the first time I've encountered a professor like this at UCLA and that I worked very hard to get into such a respectful school only to be met with professors that are this wack. Do better.