Selling textbook for geog 107. Text me at **********.

Ok I have a sense of obligation for posting this after seeing all of these reviews. No, Cusack is not as bad as people are making her out to be on this website. I don’t know how she structured old classes but now the class has you break up weekly into small groups to discuss the big soil survey with your peers. Having a week-to-week check in definitely encouraged me to work on it intermittently throughout the quarter and get advice from people with a similar climate about how to do something. The last class before the final we even had a small peer-editing session where we brought are papers in and traded them in pairs. True, she doesn’t give a lot of tips in class about how to navigate the Web Soil Survey database, but if you invest some time into examining it, it’s not as bad as people make it out to seem. The soil worksheet is probably actually harder than the assignment itself, don’t slack of on doing it and set aside a good amount of time to invest into it. It’s also NOT TRUE that lectures do not help you with the soil survey. She really clearly delicates all of the facets you would have to consider to make a agriculture, forestry, pasture, rangeland, etc plan and we went over a list of things to include in our plans a few times. She would even tailor how much she talked about a certain management topic depending on how many people were going to discuss it in their soil surveys. Personally, I actually kind of enjoyed the assignment. I would recommend picking an area that is known for having a lot of locally produced crops/meat/etc because it will be easier to choose an area for examination later (Oregon and Washington are really good for this). The project takes a lot of time in terms of research, but writing it is very easy once you have done the work. I wouldn’t worry about reaching the page limit — it’s actually a lot more concise than you think. If you want to work in a big picture land-use planning capacity I would definitely recommend this class for you. I feel like I definitely learned a lot from Cusack because she is a REALLY GOOD lecturer. She knows the material so well she can just write it on the board and doesn’t need to read it off a page (very impressive). She’s also able to break down confusing topics in a digestible way. She’s not the warmest professor I’ve ever had but she’s by no means bad. In terms of testing (one midterm and one final), Cusack purposely gives you a longer MC exam (80 questions) but then curves the test A LOT given how the class did. She is willing to make the highest score a 100% and curve from there or even make a median-ish score 100% so people can even get above 100%: the testing definitely isn’t unfair either. If you go to class and pay attention, I wouldn’t recommend reading the textbook: it’s pretty dry and doesn’t say anything better than she does. Only do it unless you just really can’t remember something from class. Props to one of my classmates who found it as a free pdf online. Yeah the midterm guides are bare bones but at least she gives you any sort of guidance about what to study — our class created a google doc and worked on it collectively. Pro tips: when testing, Cusack loves to show you a picture and ask you questions about what type of soil it is or what practice is being shown so try to memorize material like that. Also she puts NON MANDATORY barrier quizzes on ccle which you can take until you get 100%. Actually do these because she will include the same questions on her exams. I feel like this class deserves a better overall evaluation than what’s here right now. I know that I’m just one person, but I do feel like this review is a pretty accurate and fair assessment of the class. So there ya go! From my experience to yours I wish you luck on your UCLA journey lol

Professor Cusack was a great instructor. Her powerpoint slides are really helpful for studying. A textbook is required for this course but I just studied from her slides and still got an A so you'll be fine. One thing to watch out for is that her tests are multiple choice questions done on CCLE so if you're not a fan of MCQs then it's best not to take this class with her. She also likes to have questions that test factual knowledge instead of conceptual knowledge. Other than that, course material is quite easy. She also has barrier quizzes online which sometimes show up on the tests too. As long as you study the slides and do the quizzes, it'll be a breeze.