I cannot with this class I've lost so much hair over this class. She is very sweet and is clearly passionate about her work. I liked the TAs as well. But the midterms and exams are so hard to study for. They definitely test on concepts and characters, but sometimes they test on a very very specific statistic or fact. You get long long readings and you must read them for these midterms. The potential exams questions they give are not exactly helpful because they use like a few of those, and then they come up with their own. You can't really afford to miss a short answer question on a midterm since it is worth a lot of points. Would not take again

I LOVED this class!! Attendance wasn't mandatory, but I went anyway because i enjoyed the content and prof Balkwill was the sweetest. The discussion section was based only on attendance, and there was only one homework assignment which was to put your group's notes into a cohesive document once. We submitted questions to be included on the midterm and final, which created a question bank that was sent out to us. She made the test using those questions so as long as you knew all that content, you were guaranteed an A. This was genuinely my favorite class I've taken at UCLA, highly recommend.

INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHISM REVIEW
There was no option to write this review for this class, so I’m writing this here. Professor Balkwill is extremely knowledgeable in this course as well as the TAs.
Lecture: lectures not recorded, attendance at lecture is not taken but crucial due to the weekly note taking assignments.
Homework: no homework besides assigned readings before class, one required book reading
Discussion: very relaxed and open-ended, no assignments rather just a presentation and collaboration
Exams: each student uploads questions into Canvas, which are then put into a google doc as a test bank; these questions appear on the exam along with some questions Professor Balkwill creates
Exam Format: multiple choice questions, T/F questions, short-answer, long-answer, text-identification, and image-identification

Overall, this course was very insightful and interesting with no Buddhist background needed. However, due to the lack of homework, I found it hard to study for the midterm and final besides looking over notes and provided test bank. There is a lot of information and texts to understand, but overall I reccomend this course!