The workload of Ling 103 is heavy, at least for me. The grade consists of several parts. The most important part is "skill mastery", which accounts of 60% of your final grade. In order to earn full credit of this activity, you'd better do the quizzes every week. Dr. Bell introduces new materials every week. The corresponding exercises will be posted on CCLE accordingly, through which you can practice, review and preview the content learnt in class. There is specific requirement for each skill. For example, you might need 10 points for "transcribe vowel" to master the skill. If you have already earned 10 points, you can stop doing it and focus on other skills. It's clear and flexible. You might find it confusing of this assignment, but Dr. Bell will give an Excel form after the midterm. You can use the form to calculate your scores, which is very convenient. I recommend you to pay attention to the examples shown in the slides or in class, which might be shown up in the quizzes. Also, try to earn more points asap because there is also a term paper, which might drive you crazy at the end of the quarter. The term paper accounts for 22%, and it's done throughout the quarter. Its main purpose is to ask you to analyze a language that you don't know. It's broken down into 4 parts: the preliminary report (1%, mostly info about the language and your consultant); the word list (no credit, basically words from the language); recording script and annotated textgrid; and the final paper (22%). I recommend that you follow the instruction whenever Dr. Bell announces a new task. Otherwise you will find yourselves in shortage of time at the end since you have to wrap up the skill mastery, write the paper, and also prepare for the production task. The production skill is like an examination of what you have learnt throughout the quarter. It asks you to read 8-10 random or make-up IPA symbols, and you're done. The real exam is very quick to be honest, but you definitely have to know all the IPA symbols and how they are produced. There is only 10min for preparation, but our TA allows us to say it several time if we're uncertain about the pronunciation. Only the last one will be graded, which is very nice. This production task worths 15%. Dr. Bell encourages us to participate more, so there is also a participation score 1%. She also provides extra credits 2%. Dr. Bell is nice, patient, and supportive. Her lectures and slides are very neat and easy-understood. She also cares about her students and how well they do in class. If you have any concerns or questions, you're very welcome to say it in class. If you're not that kind of person, there are other methods you can share your thoughts. The shared google doc is a good one for me. Dr. Bell will post the link of the google doc in class, where everyone can share their thoughts. Also, Dr. Bell encourages us go to her office office or send her email if we need help. Even though I never went to the office hours, I feel like she cares about us. By the way, she really respects everyone in class. This class is supposed to be held online for the first 6 weeks and switch to in-person for the rest of the quarter. Dr. Bell sent us a questionnaire and ask everyone how they think. I really appreciates her for taking care of us. So, the workload is heavy and I do feel exhausted at the end of the quarter. I think this course is challenging, but if you are willing to devote your time and energy, plan ahead, follow the instructions, you should be fine.

I absolutely loved this class. Although it was definitely a step up in difficulty from ling 102, my experience was nothing but positive.

Like Ling 102, this class used a skills mastery system. However, there are 50 skills, and you only need to master a skill once to get the point for it. There are many opportunities to demonstrate the skills, mostly through weekly open-note quizzes and homework assignments. Also, mastering all 50 skills will only get you an 85% for your skills mastery grade. To get the other 15%, you need to master 18 of the 50 skills to an advanced level, which you can do by doing the Advanced sections of the homework assignments. If you want to get an A in the class, you'll definitely have to get Advanced points, as skills mastery is 65% of the grade. The Advanced sections of the homeworks can be tough, so I'd recommend going to office hours to get help. I went to Lily's office hours and she was a lifesaver! At first I didn't know that we need to get Advanced points for skills mastery (my bad for not reading the skills mastery explanation closely enough) so I had to scramble to get them towards the end of the course. Do yourself a favor and try to get them at the beginning, so that you don't end up like me having a mental breakdown trying to shove all 18 Advanced skills into a 4500 word HW writeup 😂

There were eight homeworks. The lowest homework gets dropped and Professor Bell has an extremely generous late policy where you can still get full points if you submit a homework up to one week late. Each HW involves writing a phonological analysis paper about some given data. The HWs can be tough and take a long time but working with others or going to office hours really helps.

There were two open-note asynchronous online exams, a midterm and a final. The midterm was pretty tough but still doable, and it was curved. To compensate for the difficult midterm, the final was easy. Fortunately, each exam is only worth 10% of the grade, so you don't need to stress much about exams. Prioritize the skills mastery, as that's 65% of the grade. There are also opportunities to get 2% extra credit.

Overall, I really enjoyed the course and I'd highly recommend it, as long as you're prepared to put in a lot more work than ling 102.