Based on some of the other reviews, it seems like Dr. Rashidi has taken feedback to heart. Laptops are definitely allowed for note-taking, she posts all slides prior to class, and she now provides a study guide. In my opinion, she is very available for her students and genuinely wants you to do well. She provides a cheat sheet on both exams, as well as multiple opportunities for corrections and extra credit. She is always in her office hours and happy to speak with anyone who isn't understanding the material.

I will say, this class utilizes her background in physical anthropology and you will be studying and working with bones as well as expected to learn a good deal about the skeletal system, because that is how anthropologists are able to delineate between the different groups of humans as well as nonhumans. In my opinion, that is the super cool part of this class!

As with her other courses, the slides are very dense and she gets through a lot of material. The textbooks are an absolute must have as they go very far into detail on anything you might not have understood the first time around in class. Mark down what you didn't 100% get and look it up in the textbooks. Dr. Rashidi does provide all of the slides and a study guide, though, so if you follow along in class and put in the work to study, you will be fine.

i was nervous to take this class with Dr. Rashidi because of the previous reviews, but idk what happened during the pandemic bc I LOVE DR RASHIDI. she is so kind, so helpful, and so intelligent. this was my favorite anthro class i have ever taken at ucla. she is engaging during class and knows her stuff! she's always available at her office hours and explains things really well. yes, she can talk fast during lectures sometimes, but she records them so all the information is easy to access on canvas! the course comprised of a midterm, a final, a research paper, and a few very simple homework assignments. the instructions for the homework she assigns are very clear, and you can go to her anytime during office hours to ask clarification questions. she gives you so much time to think about your research paper and a lot of the homework assignments were designed to help you outline the essay so you aren't swamped at the end. (ex: one homework assignment was literally just our research question/hypothesis, another was 2 sources, another was the essay outline, etc.! super helpful!). the material is super interesting and the midterm & final were very fair and reflective of the lectures and slides. i really recommend this class, i learned (and retained! lol!) so much, and Dr. Rashidi is just the sweetest person ever.

I took this class online due to the pandemic. The workload is fairly high and the material is pretty dense. Homeworks were usually a 2 page (Double space) write up of a subject using one or two peer reviewed articles. There was a 5-7 page research paper on a topic of your choosing that was actually pretty engaging. Midterm and final were short answer, short essay, and an essay. Open resources. Communication via email was poor. Grading was reasonable, not nit picky. Overall a fun class but necessarily an easy A.

Rashidi is the worst professor ever. I would never ever recommend this class to someone. It is unfortunate because the material is super interesting. She goes through a lot of material very quickly and does not explain her slides very well. The class is paper only and she does not allow laptops for note taking, but honestly her lectures are not much supplement to the slides. She expects you to remember every little detail for her exams and she does not even give a study guide. She also is not very responsive to emails, I emailed her three times in the quarter and never got a response back. She seems to have a lot of going on in her personal life and even cancelled a week's worth of class, which meant that she went through the material really fast so it could be on the final still. Her grading for the exams are not consistent and she was not clear about what exactly she was looking for. Some people were not docked down for only putting one word answers, while others were. She also assigns a lot of reading on top of the class lectures slides. It is like she expects people to be a paleopathologist. I would never take a class with her again.