This is the most I've ever felt engaged while watching recorded/asynchronous lectures. Highly, highly recommend !!

I feel like this is one of the easy GEs I've taken. The lectures of this professor is clear and engaging, and the workload is rather light, only multiple choice questions each week. The content is not the easiest, but it is pretty enjoyable. The final paper is released very early so you'd have plenty of time to work on it. The final exam are like the homeworks, not easy, but predictable. Overall this is a great class to take!

I highly recommend this class for interesting content and an easy workload. The lectures are super engaging and I liked that we only needed to attend 20 minutes of a nearly 2-hour-long discussion to get participation points (and participate in polls, not even speak or anything). I didn't watch any of the screenings and I got through the class fine (some of us don't have enough time for that and I think the professor knows). End of term paper was graded very leniently, and the final exam is very similar to homework questions.

This class is worth taking. Not only is it a fairly easy A if you study all the material and NOT SLACK OFF, but the material is also well-presented and very interesting. I had always heard about linguistics but always thought it was some complicated and boring topic. However, this is not the case as it is easy to comprehend and delves into an important aspect of life that we take for granted at times. My TA Gabriel Teixeira was amazing at explaining more challenging topics of Linguistics such as Phonetics and Morphology, so I recommend taking him if you guys have the opportunity to do so. Lastly, Professor Torrence is passionate about what he teaches and it is evident in his mannerisms and voice in his sophisticated pre-recorded lectures. As long as you guys watch the lecture videos and take very good notes, you will get an A in this course. Do not be intimidated by the weekly 3 hour lectures as this is not a lot if you split it up throughout the week. DO NOT leave the lecture videos for the weekend before the mid-term or final as it will be overwhelming and you will not grasp all the information you need for the exam well enough. That's all folks! Take care and do consider taking Professor Torrence for this class as he makes it manageable and getting an A is very much possible.

Going into this class I didn't know what to expect, but I actually really enjoyed it and learned a lot. You are supposed to watch 2-3 recorded videos ranging from 30 minutes to a little over an hour each week. There are 6 homework assignments which aren't bad as long as you watch the videos. The lowest homework score is also dropped. There are two essays, which were pretty easy. You discuss the use of your native language and use some concepts learned in the videos. The midterm was not bad. There were a few tough questions, but doable if you paid attention during the lectures. Time was also not an issue. Most of these concepts are self-explanatory. I don't know how the final is because I was able to opt out of it, but I'm sure it will be like the midterm only longer. There were three extra credit opportunities : fill out a survey (pre and post) and take the respondus practice quiz (respondus was the software we used to take the midterm and final).

The class was really easy, the midterm and final really determine your grade in the class. Just get an A on both and you're golden.

Professor Torrence is a really great professor, who definitely knows what he's talking about. I had Adam Chong as my TA and he was phenomenal -- he really cared about the subject and the students.

Grading was pretty fair, with two (very very easy midterms) and 5 or 6 homework assignments spread through the quarter. There were also "pop quizzes" almost every discussion session that were actually really easy (they were just one or two problems on concepts learned over the last week).

Overall, really easy GE and I would highly recommend this professor specifically.

Mainly gonna make an informative review because I recommend taking this class. This might be a little scattered.

This class is 100% online except for discussion sections, all the lectures are pre-recorded and pretty high quality because he recorded them in collaboration with the TFT 1-2 years ago. However, some weeks can be pretty boring.

There are 6 homework assignments, 2 papers, 1 midterm, and 1 final. I'm not sure but I think in Summer there isn't a midterm and there are less lectures (because summer sessions have less weeks).
The papers were graded pretty leniently (across all of the TAs based on groupme polls) and aren't too difficult, but they might take you 5-6 hours to complete. The homework, midterm, and final, are all multiple choice (but don't be surprised to see 5-7 answer choices per question). Both the midterm and final had 50 questions.

Memorization is pretty important in this class to succeed on the midterm and final. However I didn't take as many notes as I would ordinarily need to because there's a lot of detailed notes already posted on the Ling 1 Channel of the Linguistics discord server (came in clutch). Also, the screenings and case studies aren't super important, I think there were maybe 5 questions max on both the midterm and final on those things. There are a lot of experiments and studies, I wouldn't focus too much on the names /dates of them but rather what they showed. There's a lot of questions on "x evidence shows support for...". The most important memorization (and hardest week in my opinion) is for the Phonetics week because it's built into a lot of future lectures and you will need to basically memorize a different alphabet writing system in a short amount of time before the midterm, so either spend a lot of time on it when you're cramming for the midterm start early on it (all the lectures are pre-recorded and already uploaded). Make sure you know what all of the sounds make for the consonants and vowels. I found that creating pneumonics helped a lot to memorize the IPA consonants alphabet.
Other hard-ish weeks were morphology and syntax but if you practice with them you'll get good at doing problems related to them. In the other weeks it's way easier, you just need to memorize evidence, facts, observations, etc.

Professor doesn't post slides/discussion section slides aren't posted intentionally so a screenshot tool can really help you out.
There is also a textbook, you can get it online for free but I didn't really find it useful and stopped reading it after a couple of weeks. It basically reinforces the lectures. I wouldn't spend too much time on it, even reading a case study or watching a screening would be more beneficial to you, or just memorizing other things.

Some weeks are definitely easier than others, I would look into the next week's lecture videos and see how long they are. Sometimes you have 40 minutes to watch, while other times it's a few hours.

Section participation is also easy, you just have some anonymous poll questions during the TA's review lecture.

Also there was some easy extra credit too, it was 1% for doing a practice setup of the midterm and 1% for doing a survey (we weren't sure if it went to the overall final grade or just the final exam).

Overall this is probably one of the easier science GEs, as a poli-sci major I would definitely take this over a harder science. A decent amount of the weeks were pretty interesting too. In terms of the lecture/content difficulty, I would say the beginning of the quarter was easy, the middle was hard, and the end was easy again. Good luck!

This class is usually taught fully asychronously, and honestly, it's pretty great. Torrence is a pretty solid lecturer, and he does a good job of making the content engaging + relevant to stuff you might encounter in day-to-day life.

Workload is not too heavy - there's a few quizzes, and a pretty light midterm + final + essay. I think the hardest part is just memorizing the relevant sounds for consonants/vowels; everything else is pretty intuitive if you watch all the lectures + do the readings.

Def would recommend as a GE, and/or if you're interested in Ling! Torrence is a solid prof too!

This class was the trifecta: easy, interesting, and not time consuming. I took it as an online class in spring 2019. It's a standard online format, with lectures and homework on CCLE. He also gives the option for you to buy a textbook, which I suggest not to do, because it's the exact same information in the lectures but in a more systematic format. The textbook is not required.
Torrence's video lectures are very well organized but are quite long. I fixed this by putting them on either 1.5x or 2x speed. He also gives summaries periodically throughout and at the end of the lectures to make sure you're registering what you're supposed to be learning. Study the homework questions! They're honestly harder than the exam questions. Both exam were so easy that I was able to point out errors in the questions to Torrence and his TA's. As long as you take minimal notes on lectures and do homework you'll be set for the exams