Professor Gallagher is a really nice & supportive person who wants you to succeed. The class had weekly quizzes, two midterm essays, and a final essay/test. The weekly quizzes are super easy and just to ensure you pay attention in lecture. Honestly the lectures were a bit boring and I struggled to stay awake. If you want to do well, go to your TAs office hours to run your midterm ideas by them (because they grade your essay). It really helps if you can pay attention to the professors lectures because she basically explains all the important stuff in the readings.

Overall, this class was pretty interesting for me. This is definitely a good class to take the philosophical GE for any life science major. The class has genuinely interesting content. I will say it is a lot of reading at least in my opinion. However, Dr. Gallagher's lectures basically tell you everything you need to know about for your essays. For me, there were no tests in this class. Instead, there were 3 essays. The prompts were fairly self-explanatory. The TA grades your essays, so how hard they are is up to them. My TA was really nice and liked my essays so I did well overall.

First off, I took this class online during the pandemic. It is a super interesting class and I highly recommend anyone who is considering a medical career to take it even if to only satisfy the ge credit.
The class itself is kind of boring because it is all via zoom and she turns off her camera plus the chat is disabled. However, it is recorded and attendance is not required so that is a big plus.
Test wise, the TA is everything. They are very nit-picky and the instructions aren't that clear on how they want the essay to flow. She rarely gives out 100% on any essay and the mean was usually around 88-90%. They are graded as letter grades so you can get a 85-B 88-B+ 92-A- 95-A and rarely 100-A+. With that distribution, plus discussion quizzes which are super easy and she drops 3 of em, it is definitely really doable to get at least an A- in the class.
Gallagher is very helpful and her office hours are extremely useful, and even if you don't have a question, she is just fascinating to listen to.
Homework is long and the reading can sometimes take forever, but after the 3rd week, I realized that she goes over everything you need to know about the readings during lecture so honestly, I recommend skimming the readings and just listening to her lectures. Also, everything is in pdf form so it is FREE!
Content-wise, the class has a good flow, starting off with Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and Voluntary Active Euthanasia (VAE) then moving to fundamental ethical theories of deontology and consequentialism. Then into more specific Kantianism and Utilitarianism. After those broad topics, the class moves to specific arguments like ones over abortion, healthcare rights, and animal rights. The class also covers Virtue ethical theory. In the last few weeks, there is a lot of discussion on new medical technology like CRISPR and a look at where it has and can be misused.
Overall this course was a good starter to my medical journey and Gallagher is a really caring and knowledgeable professor!

professor is very straightforward. took this class online bc pandemic and she made it very fair. the tests consisted of short answer and one essay. very doable if you understand the powerpoints and lectures. lectures give you all the information you need for the exams and exams are graded by the professor and both TAs. my TA Roxanne was amazing and was lenient with tardiness and gave help whenever i had any questions. i learned a lot of interesting things in this class which i am taking for my GE.

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.

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 is a great class to take if you're interested in healthcare, research, or bioethics. The subject matter is really interesting but lectures can get tedious because they are long and there is a lot of information. This class is not an easy GE, you do have to work for your grade. With that said it's not necessarily a very difficult class either, you get what you put in. The majority of the class is based on your exam grades so it's important to do well on those. The midterms and finals consist of multiple choice, free response, and essay. They give you the essay prompt beforehand so that you have time to prepare for it and go to office hours for feedback before the exam. Professor Gallagher helps her students out and is a fair professor.

Gallagher is a super boring lecturer! She just goes off all for 75 minutes and expects you to grasp every detail she mentioned. The class is based off of the readings, so as long as you understand those you should be fine. Your TA really determines your grade, since they grade your midterms, finals, and participation. This is kind of unfair, since some TA's are a lot more lenient than others.

Some things about this class:
- I think getting an A in this class is definitely doable. It's not an easy A because you do have to put in the effort and to make sure that you at least skim through the readings and have a good understanding of the concepts to get a decent grade in the class.

- With that said, the lectures are about two hours long and they can get very tiring towards the end because she barely (if at all) takes breaks in between and she's kind of monotonous. However, every single thing that she mentions during lecture will come up on the midterm and the final with almost the same wording. Her slides alone won't really help you if you miss class and try to use it for reference, so the notes that you take in class is a good determinant of the amount of information that you need to know. If you think she said something that sounded pretty important, write it down.

- Like the previous reviews mentioned, your grade depends on your TA. I had a good TA that, during discussion, was able to clarify or add depth to a lot of the concepts that he talked about in class, so the essay and short answer portions of the exams were manageable. You can't skip discussion and it's pretty important especially if you don't have any background in ethics or philosophy because they teach you how to structure your arguments.

- As for the exams, they can be long and tiring because you have to write so much, but they're not too bad if you feel confident that you know the material. There are a few multiple choice questions, and for these ones you have to make sure you know the difference between different schools of thought, etc., because the differences can be very vague (but there is one right answer). The short answers are more open-ended because if you argue using one school of thought, you'd have a different answer than someone who uses another. The essay questions will be given to you beforehand and both times (midterm and final) you get to choose which one you do, so prepare your points beforehand so you don't lose time brainstorming during the test. There is no right answer for these writing portions, but they do want to make sure that your arguments make sense and that you show that you understand the material from lecture. I often got marked down for being too vague or for noting down ideas that don't really relate to my thesis, so I guess that's one thing to watch out for.

- The content is okay. They're interesting but the readings can be too long and boring (especially during the first few weeks). What I realized midway is that she goes through the readings and goes into detail about points that she wants you to know for the test, so even if you don't read it and just take notes on what she says about the reading during lecture, you're fine. She wouldn't test you on things she didn't mention during lecture.

- She gives back her exams, and while the questions don't repeat, it's good to go over it and see the feedback from your TA so that you don't get marked down the same thing next time. The grading scale for exams is calculated GPA-style or something, and I don't think it's curved because most people do well. The MCQ and short answers are graded to a 4.00 scale and the essay is graded on a separate 4.00 scale, and the average of those two is your total grade. She will send you a long email about how the grades were calculated, how the class did, and the cutoffs for an A, etc.

That's it I think! I didn't hate it, but I didn't really love it either. You get the grade that you work for and it's pretty fair. Some parts were really interesting to me and some were just meh. Don't stress too much if you want to/have to take this class, it will all turn out well in the end!

Gallagher's a pretty boring lecturer, I always fell asleep in class. The workload's not that bad if you don't do the reading, which honestly you don't need to do because they cover all of it in lecture and discussion. An A is pretty possible.