Maura was fine. Lots of work. Reading responses are pretty straightforward and easy to bs. If you can memorize you should have no problem in this class. As long as you write a thesis on any writing my TA was happy with it. Melissa is a great TA take her if you get a chance. The class overall is sort of interesting, but Maura's lectures are super dense and she doesn't;t know how to appropriately time them.

This was my first quarter at UCLA, so needless to say, taking this as my first experience with GE classes wasn't ideal. The structure of the class like everyone else said is pretty straightforward: weekly reading responses on 2-3 readings of the prof's choosing, one midterm (roughly 80 slides of material + 15 texts covered) and the final (not cumulative, roughly 60 slides + 15 texts covered). The midterm and the final have the exact same structure: 4 essay questions (two of these are image vs image while the other two are image vs text) in an hour and 15 minutes. The class is pretty dense and chalk full of material. I often found myself bored, studying for another class, or sleeping in my chair. The best part about this class was discussion with my TA Henry, he is super helpful and lays out exactly what he wants you to do for the structure of your essays; if you follow his guide and memorize the ID's really well, you will pretty much breeze through. Since the grading for this class is pretty much solely predicated upon your TA, I recommend you get a good one!! Towards the end of the quarter, Professor Lucking gave out an extra credit opportunity (a generous one at that): 5% extra credit on either your midterm or your final. All in all, the class is a lot of busywork, the concepts are dry but easy, get a good TA, study the ID's very well, and you will be fine.

Maura is knowledgeable about the topics that are discussed throughout each lectures, however, she just reads from her printed out notes and some of the information is difficult to digest. We had to read roughly 60-80 pages of dense reads and write a short essay for each discussion. If we turned in all 7 of the short essays, 2 of them would be dropped at the end of the quarter. Participation during discussion is mandatory. The hardest part of the class was the midterm and final where we had to remember 60 slides of pictures that were presented during lectures and then only write about 4 -6 of said pictures in the actual exam.

Although I ended up doing well in this class, I can not recommend it or its professor. On a weekly basis, an unreasonable amount of reading was assigned. The tedious amount of reading was worsened by Maura’s lectures, which were dry and difficult to follow. This could have been an interesting class, but the ideas and concepts were introduced and explained to students about as poorly as they could have been. Since I think this was the professor’s first time teaching the class, maybe future iterations of this class will be better.