I've watched less than 100 movies in my life, have 0 musical knowledge, and hardly knows anything about American culture.

So naturally, I struggled to grasp the concepts the professor teaches about music in films in general. I skipped some lectures and barely talked in discussion. However, the midterm and final exams are very easy (100% on both) and my TA was understanding. The hardest part was the essay which took so much researching especially if you can't analyze music.

In the end, I appreciate the diversity of films that came from various countries we had to watch and learned so much about music. It was worth my time.

Awesome class if you are interested in the material. The class focuses a lot on the history of sound and music in film. Assignments are watching a weekly movie, a short weekly journal, a midterm, final, and a paper on a film of your choice. I had a great time learning the material, and it definitely changed the way I view films now. Attendance in discussion was mandatory. Writing (esp. the exams) was graded pretty leniently IMO

The Ultimate MUSCLG 7 Guide

Takeaways
- Go to online discussion, watch the lectures, watch the movies.
- Start working on the essay early (unlike me).
- Enjoy the class.

Class Structure
- Lectures are posted online as Weekly Modules. These modules CAN get long, but they are truly interesting most of the times. Each module (except Week 1) has a movie attached to it that is ACTUALLY GOOD. Every module also has a Weekly Journal assignment that expects you to literally just talk about the movie and the lecture.
- Discussions start out as kind of general and disconnected from lecture, but they eventually converge so that each discussion is about the movie of the week.

Grading Structure
- (20 points - 2 each) Weekly Journals are very easy to get full points on. They should be around 200 words and should connect the lecture with the movie (incredibly easy to do).
- (6 points - 2 each) Random assignments that ask you to basically restate a portion of the lecture (also very easy).
- (10 points - 5 each) Thesis Statement Workshop assignments that have you work with a group to review each others assignments (easy).
- (100 points) The Final Paper is due at the end of Week 10. It's a 5-6 page (double spaced, 12 pt Times New Roman) analysis of the use of a musical device in a film of your choice. Not too difficult but honestly I struggled to find enough stuff to make it 5 pages at least and not leap outside the bounds of my thesis. There is a fine balance between making a 3 page essay with a shallow thesis and a 10 page essay with a crazy thesis. Start early, because discussion doesn't really help you with the essay itself.
- (100 points) The Final Assignment is a 5 day assignment that opens on the Monday of Finals Week and is due on the Friday of Finals Week. You choose 2 out of 5 short answer prompts (~200 words each) and 1 out of 5 short essay prompts (~600 words). Examples are required in each answer, and the hardest part of the whole thing is finding timestamps from the movies.

Yes, this class should be an easy A+, but I also found it genuinely interesting and insightful. Personally, I don't know much about film but I love listening to music, and luckily this course doesn't require you to be a film (or music) scholar whatsoever. If you watch the film viewings and lecture videos this class should be a breeze.
With this class being mostly online, you only ever really interact with your TA in discussion section and they grade everything - so the level of easiness in this class heavily relies on your TA. Luckily for me, my TA was amazing and super understanding if anyone needed an extension or extra help.
The only annoying thing about this class is the weekly lecture videos and film viewings, sometimes they would add up to ~6 hours of straight videos to watch which could get boring. My tip would be to speed up the lecture videos and take some notes (specific to the film viewings) because they will be useful for the final assessment.
Overall, if you do the assignments and watch the weekly lectures this class should be a fun and easy A, 10/10 recommend.

I found most of the lectures and readings were pretty interesting! The only nagging part of the class was probably watching the weekly film. Overall, the workload was very manageable and make sure to take good notes. Also I highly recommend taking a discussion with TA Ramona Gonzalez, she was extremely helpful, sharp, and quick to respond to emails.

I loved this class! If you're at all interested in looking at films (and the music) more analytically, then this class is great. There's a weekly journal, some small assignments here and there, and a final paper which you're guided through throughout the quarter. At the end, the final is a pretty simple short answer kinda thing that shouldn't take more than a couple hours. The professor knows her stuff and she's very willing to talk and help!

TAKE THIS CLASS! We watched movies for homework, had interesting lectures, and I wrote my final on Ratatouille. I always looked forward to this class every week

Overall, a fun and easy GE to take. The lectures were interesting but weren't essential to attend. They did help answer the questions for the midterm. There were assigned readings, but you didn't really need to read them, only to use them to cite in your midterm.

Details
- Weekly journals (super short, just reflecting on what you learned in the past week)
- One midterm where we answered a few short questions on the material
- A final paper on the music in a movie of your choice
- A final assessment where we answered one long question

This class was such an easy GE and the prof was super chill. The lectures were boring but some of them were cool, a lot of it was the history of film and scores. Your grading is by the TAs but all of them are super lax (the average for our midterm was a 98). You have a weekly movie to watch, some readings each week, and a 250 word journal entry due each week. There's a midterm and final that are essay questions based on the films and readings that you have a whole week to do. You really only need to watch one movie during the first 5 weeks and one movie during the last 5 weeks that you can write about on the exams; some people I know didn't watch any and did perfectly fine. At the end of the quarter, there's a 5-6 page paper due on a film of your choice but you work on it throughout the whole quarter. Discussion sections are mandatory but we never stayed the whole 50 minutes and got out early often. TLDR; easy ge but can be boring at times

Honestly didn't know what I should expect coming into this class. Since it was asynchronous, every week we would have a movie to watch, a paper to read and lectures pertaining to that movie and other concepts. We would take about them in discussions and have to write about the/analyze the lecture content in a weekly journal entry. We had both a midterm and a final that were open-book and were week long as well as a paper to write on music from a movie of our choice. Personally, I did not watch a single movie since I have no patience whatsoever and didn't take any notes either, just listened to the lectures 2x speed and still managed to do fine. It can definitely feel like a chore if you have no interest in movies and/or music though. (+it is not easy to write a paper about music). I wouldn't takeout again but it wasn't too bad either.