From what I've heard about other GE's, this is definitely one of the more work-intensive ones. According to the syllabus, students are expected to read 4 hours per lecture, which in my opinion, is a lot of reading in addition to weekly reflections, tem paper, and other small homework assignments. The professor was very nice, but she was not the greatest at lecturing. The TA's were ok at best, mostly because they didn't help much, even at office hours. There were a multitude of extra credit assignments and other random assignments to pad your grade. Participation during discussions is important as well. They did not post individual grades on myUCLA, but I assume that our quarterly reflection on the grade we deserve in the class is heavily considered in assigning grades. I would do this class only if you are super passionate about Asian American studies. I did learn a lot, but there was a lot of effort needed.

Professor Welty is a great lecturer, and this class was overall very easy, but there is a LOT of readings assigned each week and you must resist developing a habit of skipping them while focusing on your other major related courses.
There is one group presentation during discussion and one research paper that you have to write but the grading is pretty lenient.
The students get to choose what will be on the midterm and final (in class they just ask us to shout out various vocab words and topics).
Midterm contains about 2-3 identification questions which is a brief paragraph response for each ID, and then an essay prompt where you choose 1 out of 4 prompts.
Final has roughly the same structure, except there's a couple more ID questions.
Attendance is crucial. Lectures are not podcasted and her slides are not posted online, and if you skip a discussion section, they'll deduct 3% of your overall grade at the end of the quarter, and for each additional section you skip, they'll raise the percentage to powers of 3 (2nd offense: 9%, 3rd offense: 27%, etc)

Professor Welty’s lectures are very engaging and generally include a few film clips in betweeen so that you won’t need to take notes all the time. No one did tok terrible on midterm and final, as the questions are not so hard as long as you don’t answer them without any studying. However, there are 3 things to note:

1. Welty NEVER post her lecture slides online, so if you want to ditch a lecture, you should have a very good reason to conpensate.

2. For those of you with an international background, especially those who come to US for college, DO NOT mistake this class as an easy GE. According to one of my international friends who is also in the class, the readings are going to be challenging and time-consuming, and if you are not serious enough studying for the tests, you will get 60s or even fail while watching the rest of the class getting high 80s, 90s, or even 100.

3. Speaking of the readings, DO NOT read every word. Skimming the intro and conclusion paragraph and then read the first sentence are generally enough for you to understand the big ideas.

I hope the information above can help you decide whether to take the class as a GE and how to do well in it.

I highly enjoyed the topics we covered in this class. Professor Welty is an engaging lecturer, and well versed in issues that pertained to the Asian American community in the past and now. I am selling The New Chinese America for $23, it is in perfect condition. Email me at ************* if interested.