It's a shame SEAS makes this useless class as required. Waste of precious time of people should be considered unethical.

Why is this class mandatory for engineering majors? This class needs to get rid of the essay portion or the discussion section because we learned the material in English and the ethics "ideas" are useless. The lecture material and the midterm and exams are more than enough for a class like this. All of my friends and I practically BS the two essays (basically submitted our first draft) and we all got perfect scores and so did a lot of others. If the essays were technical reports and not another English essay then it might be something useful for our careers. Many other top engineering schools don't even have an "ethics" class but have a technical writing course. What a waste of my time.

Take his 183ew summer, really useless full of crap time consuming class. At beginning more than 100 students sitting, after first week 30 students there, then 15. There two exam 2 paper and a team paper. TA supposed to help write those papers, but they fooled around, I took three TA, all crap. The last one I think her name magen or something. The whole section read paper, then each of you express comments, done. She just observed there do nothing. I want my money back! I don’t understand UCLA recurring him as teacher and offer such course as must finish engineering course

As a heads up, this class is taught by both Don and another person, Jon J Fong. This review will be about Don’s part of this class. Also, I took this class during the coronavirus pandemic, and poor Don was sick for about half of the quarter.

His first 3 lectures weren't very good. He talked slowly in a monotone, and the powerpoint audio could not be sped up. Then, there was radio silence. We were given vague instructions of "Reach chapter 3 and 1 chapter per week." We had no idea we were supposed to read the ENTIRE book.

That said, he did listen, and he changed the presentations to audio format which could be sped up.

The ethics portion of the class seemed half-baked. Basically, the method of learning actual ethics was through reading the book. I literally had no clue what to read, by the way. Then EIGHT DAYS BEFORE THE FINAL, he drops THREE lectures and the WHOLE textbook as a portion of a final. Basically, we had a week to teach ourselves a quarter worth of materials for the final. That said, he let us take the final open everything, and the final itself was straightforward. Just abuse the Ctrl+F key, and you should be good. The final had an average in the upper 80s/90s, and was normalized in our favor (the top grade was set to 100%).

Next, the essays had pretty unclear instructions to say the least. Even worse, it was up to the TAs to guide you through the essays. So basically the TAs teach you to write, and they determine what you have to hand in.

The essays took forever to write, and had an overly tight deadline. For the second essay, we had to write a rough draft in just one week.

Don't get me wrong: the lectures were boring and the subject probably not super interesting to most people. But when compared to the reviews of the other ethics/writing engineering courses, this seems much, much less painful. The grade was just midterm/final and two papers. The papers were graded pretty generously, and had a lot of time to write them. The tests were incredibly easy because the questions weren't adjusted for the COVID open-book policy, so without ever watching any of the lectures, you could get a decent score just by CTRL-F-ing the textbook or just googling. All-in-all, one of the easiest and lightest courses of the quarter. I advise you take it: the alternates suck worse.

THERE ARE IN-CLASS QUIZZES NOW. AT 8 AM. NO MAKE UPS. One of the worst courses and professor I have taken at UCLA, as a senior with only one quarter left. Professor Browne is uncommunicative and puts little effort into running the class. First off, he has no syllabus for the class on BruinLearn, so students are left with little to no expectations for the class and nothing to refer back to. His main problem is that he lies to students constantly and never responds to emails. He claims over and over again to email him if you have any problems and he will get back to you, yet despite my many emails to him this quarter, he has never responded to a single one. My section had problems with a missing TA our first section and he said he would email us that night and later in the week with information on what was happening, yet he never emailed us once about it, and the only way I knew what was happening with our section was by having to talk to him in person after class. He has the most boring and bare lecture slides, and his voice is quiet yet he doesn't use a microphone so you can't even hear it. Try not to fall asleep in class challenge, impossible. For this being a class about ethics, he only discussed case studies and almost every time blamed it on the management not the engineers. In a class that's supposed to teach ethics to engineers it feels wrong to just always say its never the engineer at fault and always the management. One time in the quarter, he switched to zoom due to the storms, but posted the wrong zoom link so no students could join the lecture and never addressed the problem. He also promised to post the recording for that lecture and never did. And of course, since he never responded to any emails, I couldn't contact him about the course problems. Another problem with the course this year were the in class quizzes. This was the first quarter with in class quizzes and they went terribly. He said there would be 10 quizzes, and you literally have to bring paper every class for them, he is too lazy to even print them out. By week 7 there had only been 3 quizzes so far, so he basically lied about the number of quizzes and every time you came to class without a quiz you felt like you just wasted your time. Overall the class needs major improvements and the professor needs to put in more effort. Don't know why this class is ever a requirement as I likely lost braincells taking this class.

In ALL case studies, it's always the management's fault and yet this class is "Engineering Ethics". Ridiculous.

I would have appreciated better comuniction about the class expectations and syllabus via Bruinlearn and email coming from the professor. I understand he is old andtraditional, but in this day and age you have to expect students not to be able to attend all leactures in person and hear announcements in person. Not responding to my emails was also very much not appreciated as I am super busy and had some conflicts that needed to be resolved. The midterm and class content was pretty standard and what I expected based on conversations with other students who have taken engineering ethics in the past. For the lectures I did attend, pace was so slow and not much was being learned besides the information on the slides. Not worth attending. I do appreciate how there was adequate response to the fires earlier in winter quarter by understanding the challenges of getting our group together or attending lecture. Thus scrapping the pop quizzes in lecture as well as the group paper/project lightened the load for the class. Since I was taking three other engineering classes alongside ethics this quarter, it made my schedule manageable.

The best worst class to take to fulfill the so-called "ethics" requirement for engineers. Thankfully I took this class when everything was online as it made many aspects of this class tolerable. This class should have just been the lecture material with nothing else. Making us write argumentative essays through a "ethical" perspective creates a redundancy as we already did identical assignments in previous English classes. This doesn't help with a zealous TA who wasted my discussion sections time by spending the full discussion time. This asininity made this class feel like we're taking 2 different classes. But thankfully, we didn't have to do the group project, which again made things more tolerable.
Asides from the essays, there is a midterm and a final. Just search through the textbook or try to get old exams. No homework and attendance isn't mandatory like before. This class really should have just been the lecture without the writing portion. Could have been like a simple GE class, but they just had to shove in more useless padding. Also, I highly highly recommend you take this class during the Summer with your friends. I'm not sure if they'll bring back the group project so, try to get into the same section.

Only reason this class didn't suck as much as everyone says was because the TA (Leon) gave us more freedom to get stuff done at home instead of having to sit in the discussion for the full 3 hours, which actually made the discussions much more productive since everyone hadn't completely checked out.

The prof is actually really nice and his lectures were actually interesting, but it's hard to really care since this is either an early class. Essays were annoying but not the worst. Just pray for a good TA and you'll probably end up having a decent time