Professor McDonnell is a wonderful professor. She is an expert in her field, loves what she does, and makes it interesting for her students even if they do not necessarily have an interest in Roman Art and Archaeology. The course is not too difficult to manage, though I wouldn't classify it under "easy GEs." There are four slide quizzes, and which require you to study and memorize roughly 15-30 photos with names, dates, locations and significances. Luckily, several people from past classes have created flashcard groups specific to her quizzes on sites like studyblue, quizlet, and cram. Midterm and final are both writing but manageable with visual analysis, short answer, and an essay. For the essay, you are given the prompt(s) ahead of time, though this does mean your examples and thesis will expected to be better than if the prompt was only given on the test. As for writing, there are five responses but you are only required to do three. If you don't score as well on the first one, you may want to do four or five anyways. They are all short, 2-3 page position papers and they are not super difficult. Instead of being fact-based papers, they are more about your response to a certain idea or theme.

Overall, awesome class. Professor McDonnell and her TAs work really hard to make the class enjoyable! She jokes around with the TAs in class and really does make the material interesting. It is clear that they all truly enjoy what they are teaching and want you to enjoy it too! Highly recommend taking any class with McDonnell, as I'm sure anything with her is great!

In the beginning of the quarter I hated her but only because I was not getting the grade I wanted. For the final I made a study guide straight from her lectures and the study guide she hands and I ended up getting a A in the class. God really helped in that class since I had gotten a low B on midterms and only got one A- on papers. I honsetly do praise God for that grade. You do not necesarily need to do the readings since she goes over everything that is going to be on the midterm and finals in class. When you study, go straight from the slides. If she is using her time to teach than it is going to be on the test or else she wouldn't waster her time. There are no curveballs or trick questions. When it comes to papers, get to know your TA and what they want because they are the ones grading it. It isn't a walk in the park but it is an interesting class.

This professor was so good - her lectures were so engaging that I actually declared a classics minor. This is the best GE class I've taken at UCLA so far, and I highly recommend it. I felt like I learned so much in a decently easy class and I just loved the subject material. We learned a lot about Pompeii and I'm now obsessed with Ancient Rome. There are slide identifications which are quite a lot to memorize but definitely doable. Also, she gave hints for the prompts for the exams.

Professor McDonnell is an amazing lecturer. The subject matter itself is inherently interesting (to me, at least), but Professor McDonnell herself is what makes the class very worthwhile. She's funny and engaging, and is very approachable.

Don't bother buying the textbooks! I'm one of those people who always has to buy textbooks for classes because I get overly-concerned, but I opened these books maybe once or twice for reading, and really didn't need them at all.

The workload in the class is pretty heavy, at least for a GE. There are quizzes every few weeks where you have to memorize pieces of art/architecture from slides. It sounds daunting but they are very straightforward; honestly, if you put the time into it, there should be no reason for you to not do well on them. The tests were a little harder than I expected, but again, it's up to you to put the work in. Overall, the assignments and grading is very fair, and harder than your average GE.

Discussion sections were kind of unusually long (1 hour and 15 minutes), and function as any other GE section do — i.e., participation. There are other assignments that you have to do for section too, but they're very doable, despite essentially being busy-work.

After I did pretty meh on the midterm (79%), I worked really really hard so that I would end up with an A in the class — which I did get. Basically, as long as you do all the assignments, study for quizzes, and participate in section, you *will* get a good grade. Overall, I found this class to be one of the most interesting and fairest classes I've ever taken.

She's a pretty incredible teacher and a great lady. It's a real shame she's left and everyone here will be deprived of the experience of her awesome classes.

I audited several of her classes while she was here at UCLA because she's really just that much of an interesting and engaging lecturer. Her slides and lecture material are entertaining. She's very knowledgeable about the material and interested in imparting it to the students and getting them to engage in the class. She's a quick talker but very clear. And she's funny and quite a snazzy dresser as well.

In the large lower div lectures she gives 5 15-min identification quizzes per quarter, in addition to a midterm and final. In the smaller upper div classes she requires papers and - notably - several group presentation projects. Her classes aren't easy: she goes to quite a bit of effort to ensure her students do have to do significant work to get a good grade, but I always got the sense that most students enjoyed the classes and her teaching anyway (except for some in the lower div classes; there's always a crowd in those lectures that's only looking for an easy grade.)

I really, really wish she hadn't decided to leave UCLA. I'd have kept auditing her classes forever if I could. I was lucky enough to attend her last lecture here in spring of 16', which is the only reason I know some of the why and how she vanished from UCLA. (I'm really surprised not a single one of her students from that class left a review here.)

This last class just happened to be on the very next day after the shooting incident that occurred here at the engineering school. She spoke a great deal about that topic, along with, to my shock, announcing she was leaving UCLA. I wasn't shocked for nothing: UCLA is one of the most prestigious universities in the world and she'd recently gotten tenure here, and she told us she was leaving this job with no firm plans at all for a new one.

She said she was leaving due to recently realizing that she wasn't happy at UCLA and in Los Angeles, and would prefer to work in a smaller institution with smaller classes, as that is where she feels the best learning environments are. While I'm sure those things are true, I got the very strong impression that these were by far not all of her reasons.

As I mentioned, she spoke for the majority of that last lecture about the topic of the school shooting on campus, encouraging students to think about the issues arising from incidents like these and particularly about issues of safety, being more aware, and how to try to take some steps to get better safety measures implemented in schools to either attempt to avoid these events or deal with them as they're happening. She noted things such as the lack of internal locks on our classroom doors and the difficulty of opening windows to escape. Either in this class or a previous one I attended, she'd mentioned that she was at UNC during the 95' shooting incident there and heard the noise and panic, so this is obviously a personally significant topic to her.

Notably, she said that this - a student who's mentally unbalanced becoming irrationally angry at a professor (or classmates) and resorting to weapons - could happen to literally anyone. She said that she herself at a previous job had to personally go to great effort to help with the very difficult situation of a mentally ill grad student because that university's administration would not (and seemingly could not) do anything. And she told us how right here at a meeting of the UCLA art history department she'd recently proposed instituting safety and emergency policies for the event of a school shooting; and the response of everyone at that meeting was to simply laugh at her.

If you've bothered reading this far, you can probably see what I'm getting at here about what are likely her real reasons for leaving UCLA. I for one am deeply sad the university lost such an exemplary professor over these circumstances.

In case she ever happens to read this: UCLA has installed internally-locking locks on most of the classroom doors sometime in the past half a year, though it was probably just because of the unfortunate event in the spring and not due to any one staff member's opinion. And I've seen the occasional leaflet recently hanging off departmental cork boards here on the topic of what to do in the event of an active shooting. I guess it's better than nothing? Better late than never? Something like that.

Dr. M is the GOAT. #LATIN P4 #GIVEMEAGOODGRADEONMYTEST #PANTHERPRIDE