Ok, I have been waiting to write this for a long time. I took this class fall quarte of my freshman year. Dr. Gallagher is the most boring professor I have ever met in my life. Sometimes I had high school days that went from 8 am to 5 pm, going through classes like English Literature, Geography, Chemistry (extremely boring classes) and never, ever was even close to fall asleep. In this class I felt I was about to fall asleep something like 75% of the time. Especially when the person I sat next to was not there. I would go to lecture just to go, because following the lecture is impossible. Everything about the teacher is boring: her voice, her clothes, the way she walks, her face, her everything, unbelievable. Now, I liked the content of the class and found it interesting. I took 3 years of philosophy in high school and liked it so maybe that's also why I didn't find it difficult to understand the material. The readings are interesting too but also incredibly long. I started taking notes on the readings and on the lectures, then I just stopped cause following in class was impossible. cod mobile is a good thing to do if you don't want to fall asleep. The essay prompts are very clear. However, the grading depends on the TAs. I had Kyle Scott, and he was such a good TA. Discussions were useful and he gave really good advice for the essays. Participation matters (25%), you actually have to talk, not just show up. Quizzes are easy and help to the participation grade.

If you don't have to take this class for a requirement I wouldn't recommend it because it is a lot of reading every week, and the material is very dense. Lectures are not terribly engaging. Midterm essays are also graded a bit hard. However, I would say I learned ALOT about important concepts in biomedical ethics which I know will come up in my future. I think it's a useful but quite challenging class.

Professor Gallagher is very passionate about the subject matter which is very clear from the beginning of the class. However, the class is very reading heavy. Lectures are centralized on the readings, and are mostly quotes that are important from the readings. They are posted on CCLE, so lecture could be optional if you don't want to hear her reiterate the slides. There are three essays along with very easy pass/no pass quizzes and participation to make up the total grade. For someone with no experience in philosophy essay writing, the essays were quite hard. However, the TAs and professor really wants to see you succeed and are always there to help.

Professor Gallagher is super sweet, but yes her lectures can be long and boring. I will say, though, I thought this class was super easy. No tests, just 3 essays. I’ll be honest, I stopped reading the material she assigned after week 2 because she summarized them during lecture and basically gave you everything you needed to write a good paper. I did have to go back and read the sections that corresponded to the prompt I was writing, but it definitely wasn’t too much work. Take this class.

Phil 6 is a good GE to take, but only if you're willing to put in the work. The readings are long and they are dense, they took me a while to get through and it can pile up if you don't do them. However with that being said it's not that difficult to just listen to lecture which summarizes the ideas of the readings (very succinctly and well). Lecture was kind of boring because of the content, but she does her best. In section we had four "pop" quizzes throughout, but they're p/np and super straightforward if you do the readings. The papers are hard not gonna lie, and you have to put the work in to get a good grade on them but it is possible. Reading/writing heavy class, dense.

I was not interested in this subject, therefore I did not enjoy this class. The lectures were very long and boring. The homework load was not too bad at all. If you skim the readings before class you will be prepared. Three essays are required and you must understand the complex concepts of the readings to write a good essay. Work with your TA if you don't understand.

I took this class as a GE, so it definitely filled its purpose. There really isn't much work, except for the 3 essays and the readings. The essays got progressively longer, and the last one was about creating our own philosophy, rather than analyzing previous work. Tips on how to write the essay were usually given by your TA during discussion, who also graded the papers. I often wrote the essays the day they were due and did fine. I did the readings a few times, but the professor went over it in detail during lecture, and they took a lot of time up. Besides being used in our essays, they aren't super necessary; when looking for quotes to use in the essays, I either used the quotes that Professor Gallagher used on her slides or skimmed until something applied to my thesis. Other than the essays, the only other thing that was graded was 4 pop quizzes containing a single question, given in discussion. They were out of one point, and only the top 3 scores were included in the final grade. These questions correlated with the lectures and were often on the end of the slides. Lecture itself is unnecessary to go to, since she posts the detailed slides online. The slides were very dense, to the point that she basically read from them. I, personally, was not interested by the subject matter to begin with, and to add to that she is a very soft spoken/unexciting lecturer, so I stopped going around week 5. Overall, I can't complain, as my grade reflects the effort I put in. My TA was Sarah Beach, who was great. Discussions were often boring too, since people rarely participated, and it was spent debating/analyzing philosophy from lecture. She was very willing to help with the essays, and I received very helpful notes back from her. I probably wouldn't take this class again because of how boring it was, but it is an easy GE that doesn't require a lot of work.

Dr. Gallagher's lectures were incredibly clear, but some people may say they're dry. Her lecture slides are perfect and cover the essentials – you could ace the class only reading the slides and going to section. I took this class as a GE because I thought it would be interesting, and I liked it a lot. It's a great introduction to ethics that is put in the context of biology, medicine, and technology. Some topics we covered include abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and prosthetic limbs.

This class was super interesting and I am very glad I took it. Gallagher was pretty boring but I'd really recommend turning off phones/laptops and pretty much writing down everything she says. She stresses what she wants you to know, and you can't just rely on the slides for your essays if you want a good grade. Everyone read the readings at the beginning, but then by week 4 or 5 nobody was reading them, just waiting for her to go through them in lecture. I think you should still skim through them before/after lecture as it's good to know where the writers talk about what she's discussing, and useful for discussion sections. Go to the writing center, it was really helpful as I had not written a philosophical essay before.
Overall, the workload is pretty light and there are no tests, only essays. I'd recommend this class.

This class is great! I ended up learning so much not only about biomedical issues, but philosophy in general. I was so scared going into this class, because I had never taken any philosophy class, and didn't really know what biomedical ethics meant. I ended up loving it and now armed with so much new knowledge about issues like abortion, physician-assisted suicide, human embryonic stem cell research. Even though there was a lot of science-y, hard to understand terms in the readings that were provided on CCLE, Gallagher made the concepts so much easier to understand during lecture, so I would just do readings after the lecture, so I had some foundation on the issue. The grade distribution is: short in-section quizzes (10%), first midterm (20%), second midterm (20%), final exam (35%), and section attendance and class participation (15%). Gallagher was so understanding and puts her students first. This quarter, her daughter had to end up going to the emergency room, but she still managed to accommodate for her students and change the schedule accordingly. In addition, when COVID-19 became more prevalent during the finals week of winter quarter, Gallagher extended the due date for the final and shortened it, showing that she is understanding and can act in tough situations. Overall, I loved having her as a professor and would love to take this class again.