If I had to describe this class in 1 word it would be: disorganized.

Professor Johnson took forever to get things going at the start of the quarter. He was deviating from the syllabus which said that participation, weekly homework, weekly quizzes, and weekly exams were going to be given. He ended up only doing weekly homework and exams. He wasn't great at communicating this so none of us knew whether the quizzes were going to happen or not until like week 3.

I was excited for this class but I didn't really learn anything. The content wasn't really about critical reasoning either. It felt more like a sentence and writing structure analysis class where you analyze whether certain phrases exist and how they related to other phrases. I don't think this is the professor's fault. The entire class should be restructured.

I didn't go to a single lecture after week 1 because I felt that reading the textbook was more helpful although it wasn't very interesting. Professor Johnson doesn't upload lectures until like 2 weeks afterwards either which was frustrating. Oftentimes the recordings were like 3 hours long too because he just forgot to stop recording.

I believe the weekly homework is submission based because we didn't get any feedback/grades. The weekly Gradescope exams were awful though. I got docked off points for the smallest reasons. It felt like he just had a bone to pick and wanted to dock off points to make it seem like the students don't know anything. The exams are short (30 minutes). They are out of 3 points so losing 1 point is literally losing 33%.

I don't know how I ended up with an A. There were 8 Gradescope exams and I averaged 0.4/3. Literally IDK how that means I got an A but I'll take it.

I loved this professor. I took 177A and 177B with him, and he made the topics actually interesting. He makes a lot of references to art, music, film, etc. which is pretty cool. If you get behind on lectures or are generally lost, he will explain everything in office hours. He is a pretty laid back and understanding guy, I definitely recommend. However, there is not a lot of structure and the schedule is super tentative, so if you are big on strict schedules and such, it might not be for you.