This class was a pretty easy and interesting GE. Although it is a clicker class and in general those kind of suck, Professor Cavanaugh makes the class interesting and is pretty lenient with his grading policies. If you show up to most of the lectures, pay some attention, and take decent notes this class is pretty easy. The tests are fair and the lab section is pretty easy, although it did get annoying at times as its pretty long and had a decent workload. In terms of material, the first half is pretty dry as its mostly general science stuff like biomes and wind patterns. The second half focuses a lot on environmental issues and the reasons behind them like global warming, smog creation, wildfires etc. which makes up for the first half. Take this class if you can as its both an easy and interesting GE with a cool professor.

I would highly recommend this class. It was super manageable and an easy science GE. It was also interesting and Professor Cavanaugh was a fun and engaging professor. Lectures were interesting and the lab sections were easy to do well in.

Geog 5 one of most interesting classes I've taken at UCLA. Cavanaugh is a great professor and his lectures are very organized and clear. He also offers up to 2% EC to your final grade for participating in class. You do actually have to show up for lectures because he does clicker questions, but that's graded on participation and you don't have to actually get them correct to get credit. Labs were super simple. We usually just did worksheets and our section always got out early because they didn't take too long to complete. There is a final group project and that's probably the most amount of work. I know everyone says that the exams are easy, but I struggled with them. They're easy enough to get a good grade if you study, but not easy enough to pass without doing any work. But even if you do struggle with the exams, they're not worth enough to actually ruin your grade. I got low Bs on both the midterm and final but I think all the cushion from lab work saved my grade and I still got an A in the class.

I would say the course itself is not so difficult. There’s no midterms or finals, just a final essay. However, the weekly workload can be heavy as a GE course. You need to watch all videos posted, read a lot from the textbook, submit a discussion post, do a kind of tricky quiz, and submit a lab work ( an essay around 750 words) EACH WEEK! That’s a lot to me. Also, your ta can grade a little bit differently on your lab work. Overall, it’s easy and fun. Just too much work.

This class was very well organized and easy to keep track of weekly assignments. I also liked the fact that the weighting of grade was fairly evenly distributed between the various parts of the class, making it pretty easy to get a good grade. That said, it was a lot more work than I initially anticipated. Between the weekly readings, lecture, quiz, discussion post, lab assignment, and discussion section I found myself spending a lot of time doing work for this class. A lot of writing assignments that were often graded somewhat harshly by the TAs on account of there not being a final. Instead there is a final paper that you work on for the last three weeks of the class. Overall a decent GE class.

I took this course online asynchronously, and my main reflection is that the TA will make or break this course. As for the professor, his lectures are very clear and interesting, and the material is very easy (most of it was review of concepts I had learned throughout high school). However, my TA was very strict, marking down our participation grades if we didn't get the chance to speak during discussion section even if we attended, and grading the weekly labs unnecessarily harshly to ensure not everyone would get an A. I also found the weekly work very time consuming, with a discussion post, quiz on a chapter of reading and an hour or so of videos, and a lab/essay due every week. There was a final paper instead of a final exam, which was nice.

This class is very engaging, especially if you have any interest in climate change or environmental justice. The course is composed of pre-recorded lectures (I've never seen the professor in a live call, though he does host OH for those interested), assigned textbook readings, and often a short article related to the week's content. Everything is provided at the start of the week for students to complete on their own time. I would describe the course as easy, though there is a fair amount of work to be done, mostly in the form of weekly "lab" assignments due at the end of the weekend, which generally take a few hours to do. The workload is still nothing to worry about though, you can get all of the reading and lecture notes done in a day if you wanted and then spend a few hours on the weekend doing the lab assignment. The only assessments are weekly quizzes, which we are given 2 attempts at and are directly based off of the reading and lecture materials. My TA (Sammy) was fantastic and the discussion sections did a good job of further exploring the week's lessons by applying them to the real world or taking on different perspectives.
Overall this course was engaging and interesting; I feel like I'm truly taking away valuable knowledge from it. It's fairly easy too provided you have some time to spend actually studying the course content and focusing for a few hours on completing the weekly assignments. I would recommend it for anyone looking for a solid GE.

This class is very easy and is organized very well. The content is super interesting too. Would recommend it to anyone.

This class had me working a lot. I would spend most of my time on the labs which would end up being over 1000 words long until my TA asked for the max to be 750 words. I think the TAs were all grading a bit harsh on the labs because the professor set up a strict rubric for them to follow and since we didn't get a midterm, this fell on the labs. The readings would also sometimes be really long. I started to skim the readings towards the end of the quarter and I still did good on the quizzes. Participation is important. My TA would mark every time we talked in class and that made it a bit difficult because everyone in the class was trying to get a word in for a 50 minute class with group activities. Despite all of the work, I enjoyed the course and I do recommend it if you're interested in the subject. It might not be an easy GE if that is what you are looking for.

This class was actually a bit more difficult than I expected. It was mostly because of the workload as opposed to the actual difficulty in terms of the material. You have to do a lot of work every week and the final paper takes a lot of time, but if you do all the work you should get an A easily enough. My TA was pretty harsh on participation and it kinda screwed me, but overall not a bad GE.