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.

I made the mistake of not attending this class often, which was a mistake I won't make again. The professor was incredibly kind and accommodating, and she did her best to make sure her students had every opportunity to succeed. The concepts were all fairly approachable and there were lots of opportunities to practice. She didn't do a great job of keeping up with the class - she said she would post lectures while she was gone that took forever to make it onto BruinLearn, and she didn't update her weekly current events assignment weekly. She also assigned a group project which is purely a pain in the ass. Especially when you consider that we're in the spring, asking us to form groups and collaborate on a final project at the same time as many of our peers are giving their final capstone presentations and graduating is a huge inconvenience - the class is designed to facilitate non-attendance and independent study, and yet she forces us to work in groups. To be fair, she gave us as many points as she could in other settings, so it balances out. Overall, the content was reasonable - the beginning was fairly similar to a traditional microeconomic class, and then moved into a lot of calculations surrounding the time value of money and projects. It was reasonable and doable, I just didn't go. If you watch the lectures and keep up with the assignments, the class is super easy. She gave us ample practice problems and resources in order to succeed - the onus is on the student to take those opportunities.

As much as she's very enthusiastic and friendly, her lectures are unclear and the wording on her problem is ambiguous. Her slideshows are terrible when you need to refer back to them because most of what the class covers is from what she says verbally during lecture. The assignments are manageable but the exams can be pretty challenging. Her grading scheme makes it easy to get a good grade in the class so don't stress too much.

this professor sucks she seems nice and personable and interactive in the first couple of lectures but she is so unclear and messy, grades late and posts assignments so late, so organized with everything, never responds to emails, useless

Honestly I think Mel gets more hate than she deserves with some of these ratings. This class is pretty easy to do well in. There are many things to help raise your grade so you’re not completely screwed by the exams. I’ll admit the tests are really hard but she gives plenty of examples and literally pages of practice problems leading up the final. She is so accommodating literally all of her lectures are recorded, notes posted, she listens to students and even offered TWO dates to take the final and the option to take it at home. Her grading scale is super lenient, I think 80 is an A-. Yea her communication is sometimes not the best but if she forgets to assign a homework or post something she’ll give an extension or figure something out so it’s really no big deal. Take this class it’s pretty easy so long as you study a lil.

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.