Very unclear, goes on long tangents. So many typos on the test and homework. Horrible professor but nice person.

This class is taken in person, and Mel gives pretty engaging lectures with lots of interactions. Homework has a very acceptable workload (4 or 5 questions per week), and lots of questions are from previous quarters. Both the midterm and final are fair to me, and there's nothing surprising if you understand all the homework problems. The median is unexpectedly low (around 75) for some reason, with a large standard deviation. She uses Piazza and addresses students' questions swiftly in most cases. However, I don't find the class topics very useful or intriguing. Everything is about economics and nothing about management (as opposed to the class title).

I don't know why some of the other reviews are so negative, I loved this class. Mel IS disorganized but she makes the material interesting and her lectures were always engaging.

Participation in lectures is important because she gives a couple of online poll questions out every lecture where you get 50% if you answer it wrong and 100% if you answer it right. If less than 75% of the class answered correctly, she would even drop that question or ask it again later after re-explaining the concept.

She also has weekly current event discussions where you have to read 2-3 articles she posts (from Wall Street Journal, etc.) and post a comment about it in the discussion forum on ccle. The articles were often tedious but it's one comment a week which takes a couple of minutes.

Homeworks can be tricky but they are good help for the final, which was tricky but not at all unreasonable. Additionally, there was a group project due after finals and it's a 7 page paper for 5 group members so it's not a lot of work.

There is a required textbook for this class but I didn't need to open it all quarter, I just relied on her lectures. She posts her slides + whiteboard notes + some extra content on ccle but as long as you pay attention in class and take good notes, you're pretty much set.

SO CONFUSING

As a previous reviewer mentioned, this class is a really strange one. Mel is a really smart and approachable person in person and in office hours, but she is extremely disorganized in lectures and structuring the class. Homework assignments are the most original problems, so don't put your hopes on finding solutions easily. The best way to tackle this class especially when you have no economics or finance background is to find a good TA and stick with them in office hours. You can brute force your way through the material and possibly find understanding, but Mel often has little details written into the problems (sometimes not written at all...) and she assumes everyone is on the same page.

She does do a Piazza board, but she is not very responsive/responsive in a timely manner. The TAs don't have access to the board, so Piazza was pretty unreliable. The group project isn't bad at all. It's a good grade booster if you do it well.

Midterm was alright, and final was challenging. She provides a few old exams for both the midterm and final, and she usually will tell you the structure and content of the exams.

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.

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.

TLDR: This class isn't too difficult, but it could definitely be much better organized.

Pros: It isn't too hard to end up with an A of some sort, since according to Mel's grading scale, 85% and up is an A. There are many opportunities for you to boost your grade, such as quizzes, discussion posts, and the group paper due at the end of the quarter. As for the exams, I thought they were pretty fair and more or less reflect what Mel taught in lecture or assigned for homework. The exam averages were surprising low in my opinion: 78% for the midterm and only 66 % for the final. It makes me wonder whether people really learned from the homework assignments, since people could work on HW in groups.

Cons: The class felt disorganized throughout. Maybe it's due to the transition back to in-person classes, but I felt the organizational aspects of this course was lacking. Mel never replied to any emails I sent her, so it was extremely difficult to contact her outside of class. Her expectations on the group homework were not very clear. In the beginning of the course, she sent out a google spreadsheet where we could form our homework groups. However, if you forgot to write down the names of every group member on the homework assignment during submission, even if the names were on the google spreadsheet, the missing names would earn a 0. I didn't think this was quite fair, since Mel never clarified this in lecture.

Quizzes were also quite annoying. Every lecture, Mel would have us to do 2-3 mini-quizzes on our phones. The quizzes were password protected, so lecture attendance was mandatory. Sometimes, Mel would lose track of time, so we sometimes had to do the quizzes immediately after class (with a 3 minute deadline!). I felt sorry for those who have a class right after this.

This class is one of the easier ones to take, but needs to be way more organized.

I seriously do not understand how Mel still has a job here. She is one of the most unclear lecturers I've ever had that emphasize knowledge that will most likely not be useful were you ever to have a management position in a company. I actually don't even know why the word "management" is included as part of this course label, as I don't think we talked about management once - we spent almost all of our time talking about pretty relatively useless things such as the time value of money and the optimal levels of production and such. If you're doing the technology management tech breadth to get an idea for how to handle a business, avoid this class at all costs and stick to the MGMT courses, as those cover topics which might actually be useful.

This class is super easy - group homework and weekly current event forum posts on CCLE - but the lectures are extremely boring, and you have to attend lectures because she has mandatory online polls that count for 10% of your grade. I don't think I learned very much but it's an easy A, I recommend this if you want to boost your GPA without much work