Easy class, learned something I consider valuable, not much effort needed to get a good grade. Those are the most important things for a tech breadth class, so overall it was a solid experience. However, it was constantly annoying dealing with Mel's unorganized lectures and assignments. She would forget to assign work, push things back, not respond to important questions on Piazza, and moved many lectures online. She's clearly very busy, and I respect that, but it seemed she was too busy to teach this class for much of the quarter, which left a bad taste in my mouth. But at the end of the day, its still a fine class.

Mel is quite literally the worst professor at UCLA. She is so disorganized, her homework and tests have absolutely nothing to do with her lecture. She made our last month of class asynch lectures and disappeared to god knows where, and came back and tried to cram all the content in a week. Overall, such a bad professor, would never take a class with her again. My only advice for this class is to ask to take the tests online. She doesn't really care if you have an excuse and she frequently tolerates students taking the tests over zoom. Complete waste of time and waste of a class

Really cares about students, but is extremely disorganized leading to the class becoming more challenging than it needs to be

TL;DR: Class was okay with horribly disorganized lectures and a lazy professor

I’ll break down each thing for you so that you can get a good sense of what the class is like.

85% for an A.

HW 15%, Poll Questions 15%, Current Event Posts 10%, Midterm 20%, Group Paper 15%, Final 25%.

Difficulty? I’d say fair. Content-wise, this class can actually get difficult, especially at the second half of the class. I took this class as my tech breadth as an EE major, so I did slack off a lot in this class, initially thinking that economics is a walk in a park. With Mel, this was not entirely the case.

With HW’s you can be in a group up to 4 people. HW questions are tough and will be difficult to find if you use online resources. Because it is graded on accuracy, it is best that you confirm your answers with others, especially with the TA’s. Current Event Posts are tedious, but easy. Poll questions are ridiculously annoying because you have to attend class to get the passcode, which then you have to get the questions right as well. 40+ Questions throughout the quarter, usually 3 poll questions per lecture. 6 polls get dropped. The questions were mainly simple, but sometimes they can get tricky. Be sure to discuss with your neighbors about which answer to select. If you are too shy, then look over your shoulder to see if someone answers the poll before you. Mel is sometimes kind enough to give us the answers, but only rarely. Another EXTREMELY annoying thing is that she leaves the poll questions to the end of class. Sometimes she lectures with only 2-5 min left in the class for us to do the polls. Not enough time at all, it’s pretty frustrating. Also, expect grades to come out way later after completion.

Midterm was fair. Final was pretty hard. Final Paper is a drag, up to 6 people per group. Make sure to form a group early to get it done. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think it’s hard to get an A in this class if you put in the effort, especially with the lenient grading scale.

These are the only positives in the course. Now onto the negatives. Mel is one of the WORST lecturers I have ever had. Incredibly unorganized, blabbers on tangents very often. She takes up too much time going over random extraneous tangents that barely relate (if at all) to the class content and thinks that we understand what she is saying, but we don’t. If you have taken this class (or 111) already, you guys know what I am talking about. The other reviews ARE right. Almost a waste of time attending lecture, but it’s kind of mandatory due to the poll questions. Mel also takes forever to respond to Piazza questions/emails. Incredibly lazy. I’d say best way to reach her is through office hours or in class.

The TA’s are also ridiculous. I won’t say their names, but they were very unhelpful and didn’t seem to know what they were teaching either. It was quite strange to sight to see, especially during discussion. “Uninspiring,” is the word I’d describe them.

Overall, the class is a drag. You’ll get through it, but I’d say expect to be frustrated from the lack of communication, lack of proper teaching, lack of proper help, and ultimately self-studying from time to time. Content-wise, it is crammable. It is “easy” in terms of the content, but the things surrounding it is what makes it way worse.

Absolutely insane experience. worst teacher i have ever had. She had quizzes due with codes she misspelled or forgot to give the codes for that would automatically be a late and 0. It took her weeks to respond with multiple emails (6+ emails). She even graded people’s final projects marking people down (-18%) for a missing section of the project that was not even asked for. She was insanely disorganized and is impossible to get a hold of. She messed up multiple times in things that should have been easy and she even taught a part of accounting saying “everyone has been doing this” and it is illegal… take her if it is your last choice only

First and foremost, this class is pure economics. I took this course without doing my research, expecting to learn principles of management relative to engineering, and there is none whatsoever. The professor is very kind and funny, and the lectures were genuinely pleasant, however the material was deceptively difficult for me. If you’re looking for an easy class that you can skate through without effort, this really isn’t it. If you’re looking to learn about economic principles, such as loan interest calculation, comparing projects based on pure numbers of revenue and expense, and general factors of supply and demand, this is the class for you.