Quarter Taken:
Winter 2020
Submitted March 27, 2020
Grade Received:
B+
This review is for Matthew Hayes, unfortunately he isn't on Bruin Walk for some reason. This class has three papers, one midterm and a final. So, if you do badly on a paper or midterm it can be pretty unforgiving on your final grade.
This class, to me, feels divided. Lecture material has minimal correlation to the workload for discussions. Discussions are instructed by TA's and mainly focus on building your research paper for the entire quarter. Your research paper has three drafts the first draft, the second draft, and the final draft all of which account for the three paper schemes. Personally, I found discussion to be a waste of time because it just felt uncoordinated with no real lesson plan. Your final grade heavily depends on the TA you get, and obviously some TA's are tougher graders than others. To my knowledge, no grade adjustment was done to account for this, which other classes at UCLA have done before. Tough luck if you get a difficult TA, you'll just have to deal with it.
Matthew Hayes is an okay professor. His lectures are very slides heavy and does not post the slides on CCLE. Lectures aren't very engaging. But, Matthew does a great job on providing analogies to break down Buddhist concepts that would be on the midterm and final. The midterm and final are memorization based, so if you utilize short term memory studying in learning all the terms two days before you should be fine.
I personally did not enjoy the grading in the class and discussions. However, I did enjoy the snippets of lecture material as it is an interesting subject.
Overall, this class can be very unforgiving in terms of your final grade. Take at your own caution.
P.S for clarity, my TA was Tom Newhall.