I don't care what anyone else says, this class is super challenging, tedious, and designed to make you suffer and on the verge of failing. The professor and TAs (especially the TAs) are extremely unprofessional and unempathetic If you want to keep your mental health intact, DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS, you're for sure going to suffer over this "elective class".

First of all, each week you have to watch over 10 lecture videos and over 3 readings. There's 3-5 quizzes every week for the lectures, one final policy brief research paper, and 1 timed exam every two weeks for everything you learned. Each quizzes only have 1 super complicating question and 1-2 attempts, so if you fail, you lose 100% on that quiz. The quiz and exam questions are also written in a way that confuses you, making you unable to decide between two choices.

Here's what also happened in the class:
- The TAs are completely useless, students have been expressing how challenging this class is as an elective and how the timed exam is given with too short of a time to complete, and the TAs did nothing until the students start emailing the professors directly. And even then she took two weeks to make the adjustments when all her classes are prerecorded already.
- The TAs are also just absolutely crazy over the syllabus and rubric. You ask them a question even when it's not on the syllabus, they refer you to the syllabus still and said nothing else. They graded the quizzes and exams so harshly that even when it's open note, you still get a 30% grade.
- Best of all, when I attend my TA's office hours, she wasn't even there! I scheduled an appointment with her, and she wasn't even there neither! I had to wait over 40 minutes for her to come in after she saw my text, just for her to say "well did you read the syllabus?".
- What's laughable is that when I contact them about my concerns for the low grades they're giving me, they DISABLED the visibility of the grades and took days! This is really all just some sick game to them.
- Every week or once a week, other students and I will received multiple automated emails about "missing" assignments when we never knew that it existed before.
- At one point, I would also receive automated emails about the professor changing the due dates MULTIPLE times last minute.
- I submitted my assignment ON TIME, and the TAs and professor completely changed the assignment submission box which deleted my submission and they NEVER TOLD ME ABOUT IT. I had to reach out to them and say that my submission disappeared, and the only thing my TA responded to me was: “oh sorry it got deleted”.
- ^not only this happened one time, but it happened a second time on the same week. Where I submitted my comments and rubric for the peer reviews assignment and EVEN COPY AND PASTED AS A PDF TO SUBMIT IT AGAIN. Everything is gone the next day and the professor and TA has no idea what they’re doing. The entire class had to guess and figure out what happened in the slack channel.

This is only an elective and I tried my very hardest in this class, even re-watching lectures, reading the transcripts as I watch them, doing research on the class materials to better understand, etc. And I still get a 30% on my quiz. I have to emphasize again, I’ve never tried THIS HARD in any other classes. I’ve passed psychobiology, astronomy (physics), history, musicology, etc as GEs and I passed them all without being driven insane two weeks into the quarter. This “elective” class, is on a whole new level.

In short, the TAs and professor for this class is just heartless, useless, and unprofessional, they won't help you, they'll just increase the length of lectures, increase the amount of quizzes, and make the entire class more challenging as weeks go by, like they're torturing you on purpose. I stressed and panicked at least five times a week since week 1.

This class was interesting and I was hesitant to take it with the poor reviews. I found that Professor Blackstock-Bernstein was very helpful, engaging, and flexible when we needed it. If you are not able to manage asynchronous formats with a couple hours of lecture this week, this course is not for you. But the content was engaging and never felt too overwhelming unless I got behind on the readings. I highly recommend this class!

I thought that this upper div was a little too difficult. It's super time-consuming, and I don't know if the professor realizes that we also have other classes that we have to take too. Yes, the professor is nice, but there were times where her messages to students came off as passive-aggressive. If you do take this class just be prepared to watch a ton of lecture videos during the week on top of readings, quizzams, and discussions. I also wasn't a fan of my TA. Whenever people asked her questions, she never really answered them. I personally thought the workload was way too much, especially for an education upper div. The content itself was interesting, but not really worth it when looking at how much you had to do over the quarter in order to get a good grade. It was a big cause of my stress during winter.

AVOID HER AT ALL COSTS!!! She is the worst professor at UCLA I have ever had in the past three years. Both the TAs and Profesor are here to torture you on purpose.

Do yourself a favor and DO NOT take this class. If you have enough stress in your life do not add more. Professor and TA are not helpful and unempathetic. You will thank me. One of the worst professors at UCLA.

I liked this class a lot and found the topics interesting so I found myself actually reading and being engaged in the lectures. It was asynchronous style but I felt that I learned a lot because I actually spent time reading the articles assigned and taking notes on the lecture videos. Things in this class can be straightforward but they build on previous topics so you need a good foundational understanding. It is good to make yourself a study list and you should try to be able to explain the concepts learned to someone else like a friend or sibling that hasn't heard of it before (or read at all). I got all A's on the "quizzams" as professor calls it because it's a mix of a quiz and an exam but she gives you plenty of time to complete it. However, I know that these quizzams were a bit challenging for other people so I say if you watch the lectures to get the key concepts and understand and can recall what is in the reading, and then apply these to real world examples you'll be good. I was never one to do a deep reading but a quick read (even the day of the test, which I did), is good enough.