Overall this class was a good GE! It's fairly interesting/straightforward. There are weekly take home quizzes (10 questions multiple choice, open note) that are worth 30% of your grade, weekly discussion activities are worth 30%, a multiple choice midterm worth 20% and a multiple choice final worth 20%. If you want a low workload GE, take this class! For the midterm and final, it's a lot of memorization. I studied a little for the midterm and did ok, I studied a lot for the final and did well. Professor Day is funny and engaging. Would recommend!

The discussions were mandatory, but they were easy points. I had Sarah Preston as a TA and she was super amazing. She grades a bit harshly, but she offers extra credit every week.

There's a quiz every week, but the lowest quiz grade is dropped. When I had a family emergency and I missed another quiz, Professor Day was super understanding and was nice enough to open it up for me again.

The exams were all multiple choice and even had bonus questions attached. I stopped going to lecture after week 2, but I still managed to score pretty well. I was hoping for a study guide for the final or just more guidelines as to what would be tested, but I just crammed all the lecture videos on 2x speed and I still got an A.

Overall, this class is honestly so free and one of the easiest GE's I've ever taken. This was great considering this was the first time Professor Day's taught the class.

This class is ridiculously easy.

I studied for around 2 hours the night before the midterm and final and was able to perform well. Besides this, there are easy weekly quizzes and mandatory discussion sections. If you just do these steps, it is very achievable to get an A in the class.

Professor Day offered 3% extra credit at the end of the quarter, and you could also earn extra credit for each discussion section activity.

The class itself is pretty interesting. You will leave knowing something new about each planet and the solar system as a whole. Professor Day tries her best to make each lecture interesting and often puts on live demonstrations of concepts. The class briefly covers basic physics and math concepts, but you will not be expected to perform calculations on the exams. At most, a question will ask what a particular symbol in an equation stands for.

All in all, if you need an easy physical science GE, I can't recommend this course enough.

Lectures are fine, but can sometimes be a little boring. The discussion section activities didn't help enhance my understanding of the material, and were sometimes graded a bit harshly.

My main issue with the class lies within the lack of guidance on Professor Day's behalf. She didn't give a lot of advice regarding what we needed to review for the midterm / final, so some of the content on the exams really blindsided me. We also really didn't have any material to study from other than our lecture notes.

She offered extra credit for some stuff, though, which was nice of her.

Material is clear and she is a great instructor overall. I think some weaknesses are that there is a lot of material to absorb and no textbook to study off of. The only way to study is off the notes we took in class which is limiting. I wish the TAs knew what was on the tests because we had no idea if some things were going to be on the midterm. A study guide would also help.

EPS-9 was anticipated to be an engaging and relatively straightforward GE course. However, my primary concerns about the course stem from the weekly quizzes, which often do not directly align with lecture content. Additionally, the lecture slides are not consistently engaging or packed with useful information. Throughout lectures, Professor Day's delivery often comes across as disinterested, leading to frequent deviations from the intended content. The rapid pace of the lectures makes note-taking challenging, further exacerbating the difficulty of keeping up.

Moreover, the lack of clarity surrounding exam content, coupled with minimal practice problems and a dearth of material directly from the slides, added to the frustration. As someone with a genuine interest in space and the subject matter, learning under these circumstances proved to be arduous. Furthermore, I had hoped to enroll in an easy to moderate GE course to balance my already demanding core class load, but EPS-9 fell short of meeting this expectation.

Despite the average exam score hovering around 82, indicating the exam's difficulty, the absence of curving or additional support added to the frustration. The instructor's intimidating demeanor only exacerbated the situation, leading me to rely heavily on my TA for assistance, albeit with limited success. Overall, I am dissatisfied with the organization, difficulty level, and content delivery of this course.