Professor

Sean Walsh

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3.7
Overall Ratings
Based on 21 Users
Easiness 3.2 / 5 How easy the class is, 1 being extremely difficult and 5 being easy peasy.
Workload 3.3 / 5 How light the workload is, 1 being extremely heavy and 5 being extremely light.
Clarity 3.5 / 5 How clear the professor is, 1 being extremely unclear and 5 being very clear.
Helpfulness 3.5 / 5 How helpful the professor is, 1 being not helpful at all and 5 being extremely helpful.

Reviews (21)

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March 26, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A-

Professor Walsh was an outstanding professor. He spoke slowly and clearly, considering how some of these concepts are a little bit mind-bending. Given that this was my first class in logic, I believe the foundations were lectured upon very well. Homework was easy--you get a perfect score on them if you finish. The class is very precise and conceptual, but easy to grasp when given some time to think over the concepts (I was creating a study list as I went along to keep track of everything).

Referring to other reviews, I agree that things were trickier after the midterm, but the Professor recognized this and tried to make the homework problems easier. I genuinely had no real problem with the professor or class and I would recommend it to anyone looking for an intro logic course.

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March 26, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A

Everyone’s gotta relax. This class was not as hard as everyone says it was. I stopped going to lecture or office hours after about week 3 because everything you need to know is on the lecture slides which he literally reads off of every lecture/discussion. Not the greatest professor and not the most exciting either but he gets the job done.

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March 26, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A

Very do-able class. Walsh explains everything clearly. You always know what to expect on the exams. Put a little effort and this class should not be hard, but at times the subject matter can be dull. So hopefully you're a little interested

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March 26, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A+

This class was fine. Lectures may have been a bit boring at times, but this was mostly because the professor was going through example problems very slowly and clearly. Like a lot of people are saying, the first five weeks were easy, then the course suddenly became much harder in week 6/7. After week 6 and 7, the class became a lot easier again, provided that you understood the basic concepts of week 6 and 7. The thing that I really like about Professor Walsh is that you can tell that he cares about his students. He warned us at the beginning of week 6 that the material was about to get harder, and reminded us that there were tutors available if we needed any help. Also, he made the homework easier for week 7 onward after he heard that students were struggling. Students asked a lot of questions during lecture, which Professor Walsh always took the time to answer. He was also very welcoming during his office hours, at least both of the times I went.
The grading system of the course makes it easy to score high. Professor Walsh uses a computer program to complete the homework. This computer program checks your work and only lets you submit each problem if it is correct. Also, if for some reason you are unable to complete the homework, you can submit problems up to 1 week late for 2 out of 5 points. For each exam (worth 25% each), the professor gives 3 practice exams which, except for maybe 1-2 problems, are very similar to the actual exam. I highly recommend completing these if you want to do well on the actual exams.

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March 28, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A

If I am being really honest, I stopped going to lecture after week 1 and never even been to one discussion (so to this day, I have no idea what my TA looks like). That's because all the lecture materials are exactly the materials that Professor Walsh posts on ccle (carnap.io), so you can basically teach yourself with his lecture notes, which is what I did. I agree with a lot of the other reviews in that the material got a lot harder after the midterm (week 5), and I spent a considerably larger portion of time on each weekly homework problem set. However, I still felt like everything was pretty manageable - those harder questions on the homework sets really just takes time to figure out, and once you see a pattern, you tend to get better and quicker at solving problems with similar proofs.

Since I really went to about one single lecture, I can't really say anything about what the professor's like as a lecturer, but from our few encounters (emails, that one lecture I went to, exam time), Prof Walsh seems like a really nice person. He patiently answered all of my questions (on email and in person), and I just felt that he's a genuinely good person and really cares about the performance of his students.

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March 31, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A

I thought Professor Walsh was a great professor who provided a lot of resources to make sure students succeeded. I think the struggle of other people comes down to their struggle with the material. If you are struggling that much there are a lot of different resources available —practice problems (with solutions) that were nearly identical to the hw problems to learn from, so many tutoring hours, office hours, Walsh being super responsive to emails and questions during and after class, etc. If you struggled a lot in this class, I'm not sure how much u can blame Prof. Walsh and not urself for not taking advantage of all the resources that were available earlier. And the two exams were EXACTLY like the practice exams. And he gave us three practice exams per test!

Pretty much, put in the time and don't procastinate and you should do fine. I had a great experience with prof. Walsh

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March 22, 2023
Quarter: Winter 2023
Grade: NR

Wow I genuinely created a Bruinwalk account for this review. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS!! I cannot emphasize this enough. Majority of the class, including me, took Levy for Phil31 and it was a million times better than this class. I thoroughly enjoyed 31 with Levy and Logic 2010 was amazing. We used Carnap in this class and while it wasn't the worst, it was definitely trickier than Logic 2010. You have to be so specific with each thing you type and it also does not help you at all if you make a mistake.

The start of the class wasn't too bad, as it was basically just extending our knowledge from Phil31. It really started to get tricky around week 3. After week 3, you basically HAVE to go to office hours and tutoring at least once a week in addition to section and lectures in order to understand the content. Even going to them, it's still difficult to understand the content. However, the midterm wasn't too bad and was pretty reasonable.

After the midterm is when things REALLY start making you wonder why you took this class. The content gets crazy hard and the lectures don't really help. While they do teach you the basics, the homework and quizzes each week are exponentially harder. I haven't even mentioned the absolutely INSANE amount of homework and quizzes you have to do each week. Every week there's a homework and quiz due and the amount of time you have to spend on the homework in order to complete it exponentially increases week after week. By the end of the class, everyone was spending multiple days and probably over 10 hours on each homework assignment. While the two lowest homework and quiz grades get dropped, don't expect to fully complete a majority of the assignments due to the difficulty.

The amount of studying we had to do for the final was terrible. In addition to learning all of the content, we also had to memorize 20 definitions and do the quiz like questions. At the end, even the TA and the tutors were so overwhelmed and could not answer a lot of the practice questions for the final. Basically no one finished the final on time due to the overwhelming number of proofs we had to do which were all handwritten by the way. No computers allowed for exams. Have fun writing over 25 lines on paper and erasing all of them!

In conclusion, so many people dropped this class and I wish I did too <3 It's too bad though I did like Professor Walsh as a person!

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March 14, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: DR

Taking this class was by far the worst decision I have made—LITERALLY THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE.
The lectures are 1 hour 15 minutes twice a week, and there is a 50 minute discussion as well. Instead of the discussion period being used as a discussion (asking the TA questions, etc.), the discussion was used as a third lecture period, which made NO SENSE. I had to seek out outside tutoring, I went to office hours, and did everything else I possibly could to try and teach myself the material, but ultimately, I had to drop the class DURING WEEK 9.
I have never done so poorly in school or in a class. My GPA was at risk, so unfortunately, I had to take the "Dropped Week 9" on my transcript instead of an F. When I went to drop the class, there were 10 other people in line outside of Professor Walsh's office waiting for him to sign the drop form. Everyone was dropping because they knew they could not pass the class.
I cannot express enough my disappointment in UCLA regarding this specific matter. This class made me feel so stupid, until I realized that half the class was doing as poorly as me.
DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS WITH THIS PROFESSOR. YOU WILL REGRET IT.

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March 19, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A

I honestly didn't think this class was as bad as everyone is saying that it is. Professor Walsh was super unhelpful and unclear, and I basically stopped going to class and just reading the carnap.io after week 2. Before week 6, everything was pretty easy, but stuff got complicated quickly after that. I think my understanding of the subject material decreased by like 20% post-week 5, but going to office hours and tutoring sessions was helpful. I will say that I totally understand why most people hated this class - carnap.io is a terrible software platform and the course was poorly taught. However, I kinda enjoyed the subject material and I think my mind just works in a way that is compatible with the course material. If you hate math/logical reasoning, don't take this course - the second half of it will drive you insane.

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March 18, 2020
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: NR

I cannot stress enough how painful this class was. I'm a cog sci pre-major and this was a prerequisite but wow I wish I would've enrolled in another philosophy class because there are no words to express how awful this class was. Leading up to the midterm, things are SOMEWHAT *okay* but after? The entire class took a hard left turn and absolutely nothing made sense anymore.

Also, this class is so fucking obscure that no amount of youtube videos or google can help you. Also, discussion is used as a third lecture which is absolutely maddening and makes zero sense. Not to mention Carnap.io SUCKS and everything that was on the lecture notes was written in unnecessarily elevated language that made it difficult to parse.

Overall, Bruins, please spare your GPA. I could've had such a great GPA this quarter if it wasn't for the fact that I'm getting a C or C+ AT BEST in this class. If the class was heavily curved, it'd be SLIGHTLY less painful, but nope.

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PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A-
March 26, 2020

Professor Walsh was an outstanding professor. He spoke slowly and clearly, considering how some of these concepts are a little bit mind-bending. Given that this was my first class in logic, I believe the foundations were lectured upon very well. Homework was easy--you get a perfect score on them if you finish. The class is very precise and conceptual, but easy to grasp when given some time to think over the concepts (I was creating a study list as I went along to keep track of everything).

Referring to other reviews, I agree that things were trickier after the midterm, but the Professor recognized this and tried to make the homework problems easier. I genuinely had no real problem with the professor or class and I would recommend it to anyone looking for an intro logic course.

Helpful?

2 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 26, 2020

Everyone’s gotta relax. This class was not as hard as everyone says it was. I stopped going to lecture or office hours after about week 3 because everything you need to know is on the lecture slides which he literally reads off of every lecture/discussion. Not the greatest professor and not the most exciting either but he gets the job done.

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2 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 26, 2020

Very do-able class. Walsh explains everything clearly. You always know what to expect on the exams. Put a little effort and this class should not be hard, but at times the subject matter can be dull. So hopefully you're a little interested

Helpful?

2 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A+
March 26, 2020

This class was fine. Lectures may have been a bit boring at times, but this was mostly because the professor was going through example problems very slowly and clearly. Like a lot of people are saying, the first five weeks were easy, then the course suddenly became much harder in week 6/7. After week 6 and 7, the class became a lot easier again, provided that you understood the basic concepts of week 6 and 7. The thing that I really like about Professor Walsh is that you can tell that he cares about his students. He warned us at the beginning of week 6 that the material was about to get harder, and reminded us that there were tutors available if we needed any help. Also, he made the homework easier for week 7 onward after he heard that students were struggling. Students asked a lot of questions during lecture, which Professor Walsh always took the time to answer. He was also very welcoming during his office hours, at least both of the times I went.
The grading system of the course makes it easy to score high. Professor Walsh uses a computer program to complete the homework. This computer program checks your work and only lets you submit each problem if it is correct. Also, if for some reason you are unable to complete the homework, you can submit problems up to 1 week late for 2 out of 5 points. For each exam (worth 25% each), the professor gives 3 practice exams which, except for maybe 1-2 problems, are very similar to the actual exam. I highly recommend completing these if you want to do well on the actual exams.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 28, 2020

If I am being really honest, I stopped going to lecture after week 1 and never even been to one discussion (so to this day, I have no idea what my TA looks like). That's because all the lecture materials are exactly the materials that Professor Walsh posts on ccle (carnap.io), so you can basically teach yourself with his lecture notes, which is what I did. I agree with a lot of the other reviews in that the material got a lot harder after the midterm (week 5), and I spent a considerably larger portion of time on each weekly homework problem set. However, I still felt like everything was pretty manageable - those harder questions on the homework sets really just takes time to figure out, and once you see a pattern, you tend to get better and quicker at solving problems with similar proofs.

Since I really went to about one single lecture, I can't really say anything about what the professor's like as a lecturer, but from our few encounters (emails, that one lecture I went to, exam time), Prof Walsh seems like a really nice person. He patiently answered all of my questions (on email and in person), and I just felt that he's a genuinely good person and really cares about the performance of his students.

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 31, 2020

I thought Professor Walsh was a great professor who provided a lot of resources to make sure students succeeded. I think the struggle of other people comes down to their struggle with the material. If you are struggling that much there are a lot of different resources available —practice problems (with solutions) that were nearly identical to the hw problems to learn from, so many tutoring hours, office hours, Walsh being super responsive to emails and questions during and after class, etc. If you struggled a lot in this class, I'm not sure how much u can blame Prof. Walsh and not urself for not taking advantage of all the resources that were available earlier. And the two exams were EXACTLY like the practice exams. And he gave us three practice exams per test!

Pretty much, put in the time and don't procastinate and you should do fine. I had a great experience with prof. Walsh

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 132
Quarter: Winter 2023
Grade: NR
March 22, 2023

Wow I genuinely created a Bruinwalk account for this review. DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS!! I cannot emphasize this enough. Majority of the class, including me, took Levy for Phil31 and it was a million times better than this class. I thoroughly enjoyed 31 with Levy and Logic 2010 was amazing. We used Carnap in this class and while it wasn't the worst, it was definitely trickier than Logic 2010. You have to be so specific with each thing you type and it also does not help you at all if you make a mistake.

The start of the class wasn't too bad, as it was basically just extending our knowledge from Phil31. It really started to get tricky around week 3. After week 3, you basically HAVE to go to office hours and tutoring at least once a week in addition to section and lectures in order to understand the content. Even going to them, it's still difficult to understand the content. However, the midterm wasn't too bad and was pretty reasonable.

After the midterm is when things REALLY start making you wonder why you took this class. The content gets crazy hard and the lectures don't really help. While they do teach you the basics, the homework and quizzes each week are exponentially harder. I haven't even mentioned the absolutely INSANE amount of homework and quizzes you have to do each week. Every week there's a homework and quiz due and the amount of time you have to spend on the homework in order to complete it exponentially increases week after week. By the end of the class, everyone was spending multiple days and probably over 10 hours on each homework assignment. While the two lowest homework and quiz grades get dropped, don't expect to fully complete a majority of the assignments due to the difficulty.

The amount of studying we had to do for the final was terrible. In addition to learning all of the content, we also had to memorize 20 definitions and do the quiz like questions. At the end, even the TA and the tutors were so overwhelmed and could not answer a lot of the practice questions for the final. Basically no one finished the final on time due to the overwhelming number of proofs we had to do which were all handwritten by the way. No computers allowed for exams. Have fun writing over 25 lines on paper and erasing all of them!

In conclusion, so many people dropped this class and I wish I did too <3 It's too bad though I did like Professor Walsh as a person!

Helpful?

1 0 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: DR
March 14, 2020

Taking this class was by far the worst decision I have made—LITERALLY THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE.
The lectures are 1 hour 15 minutes twice a week, and there is a 50 minute discussion as well. Instead of the discussion period being used as a discussion (asking the TA questions, etc.), the discussion was used as a third lecture period, which made NO SENSE. I had to seek out outside tutoring, I went to office hours, and did everything else I possibly could to try and teach myself the material, but ultimately, I had to drop the class DURING WEEK 9.
I have never done so poorly in school or in a class. My GPA was at risk, so unfortunately, I had to take the "Dropped Week 9" on my transcript instead of an F. When I went to drop the class, there were 10 other people in line outside of Professor Walsh's office waiting for him to sign the drop form. Everyone was dropping because they knew they could not pass the class.
I cannot express enough my disappointment in UCLA regarding this specific matter. This class made me feel so stupid, until I realized that half the class was doing as poorly as me.
DO NOT TAKE THIS CLASS WITH THIS PROFESSOR. YOU WILL REGRET IT.

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2 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: A
March 19, 2020

I honestly didn't think this class was as bad as everyone is saying that it is. Professor Walsh was super unhelpful and unclear, and I basically stopped going to class and just reading the carnap.io after week 2. Before week 6, everything was pretty easy, but stuff got complicated quickly after that. I think my understanding of the subject material decreased by like 20% post-week 5, but going to office hours and tutoring sessions was helpful. I will say that I totally understand why most people hated this class - carnap.io is a terrible software platform and the course was poorly taught. However, I kinda enjoyed the subject material and I think my mind just works in a way that is compatible with the course material. If you hate math/logical reasoning, don't take this course - the second half of it will drive you insane.

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2 2 Please log in to provide feedback.
PHILOS 31
Quarter: Winter 2020
Grade: NR
March 18, 2020

I cannot stress enough how painful this class was. I'm a cog sci pre-major and this was a prerequisite but wow I wish I would've enrolled in another philosophy class because there are no words to express how awful this class was. Leading up to the midterm, things are SOMEWHAT *okay* but after? The entire class took a hard left turn and absolutely nothing made sense anymore.

Also, this class is so fucking obscure that no amount of youtube videos or google can help you. Also, discussion is used as a third lecture which is absolutely maddening and makes zero sense. Not to mention Carnap.io SUCKS and everything that was on the lecture notes was written in unnecessarily elevated language that made it difficult to parse.

Overall, Bruins, please spare your GPA. I could've had such a great GPA this quarter if it wasn't for the fact that I'm getting a C or C+ AT BEST in this class. If the class was heavily curved, it'd be SLIGHTLY less painful, but nope.

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1 1 Please log in to provide feedback.
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