The exams and midterms were fair as it only encompassed what you have learned in class. The material of the class were quite interesting but I always find myself sleeping through the lectures. As long as you do all the response papers and the weekly readings you will get an A.

WORST PROFESSOR IN UCLA. Amir Alexander even puts himself to sleep during his lectures. The course material is already dry as it is, yet he somehow manages to make it a torturous task to sit through lecture (which is mandatory). He is extremely unpleasant and unhelpful. The course material is so irrelevant and boring. Lecture has no similarity with what you are tested on. His slides are non-existent. So much work for what is supposed to be an “easy GE.” Don’t be fooled! History 3A with Amir Alexander may possibly be the worst decision you make in your life. Consider yourself warned.

A laid back professor. He treats his students like they are in college, not like high schoolers, which I appreciated. His tests were interesting, he adds terms you choose from to add within the paper, which helps in giving clues if you happen to forget important pieces of what was taught. The readings were very interesting and every week I enjoyed what I was to learn next. I went to his office hours and he was supportive and willing to talk about school, life, career goals, etc. I suggest taking him, plus his lectures are podcasted but do not miss too many classes since this accounts for 10% participation grade.

Excellent professor and class! I'll admit a few sections were a bit tedious and boring to get through but overall it was very interesting and was a perfect GE for any STEM major as it involves out field and is not heavy on writing

This class is one of the most difficultly easy classes I've ever taken in my life. Grading depends ENTIRELY on your TA so it's really luck of the draw if you get one who is gracious or not. The grading system is based on watching two movies and writing short reports (2.5% each), going to the Getty and writing a report (5% and you have to figure out how to get there, taking pop quizzes (20%), attendance and participation (25%), and then writing a midterm and final paper (15% and 30% respectively). The attendance is this classes saving grace as the papers can be difficult and the quizzes are hard to prepare for. Basically, you spend like $150 between the books and course reader and have to read like all of everything to prepare. Randomly, the professors give a pop quiz during lecture and you have to recall the author, title, and publication date of a given paragraph from one of the readings and, since each week's readings are based on the same topic, it's quite difficult to recall which paragraph is from which piece. If you abuse the life office hours (of your TA because they're who matter for your grade), you should do well. As few students tend to take this cluster, you may even get lucky and have your TA read and edit your paper long before it's due to ensure that you get an A. Side note: Sissa and Stahulyak (the professors for the Fall quarter) are very nice individuals but are often hard to follow in lecture. The slides are tiny and are usually either A) direct quotes from the reading that they read directly off of or B) totally unrelated to the readings and thus unrelated to any quizzes or papers that you may write. This was cool for a while, but the novelty of learning fun facts wore off when the lack of coverage of actual course material reflected itself in my grades for quizzes. Do the readings and rely on your TA and you should do well.

Overall, the class was easy. As someone who isn't a fan of history or science, I didn't really find myself interested in his lectures, but his lectures were really clear. Definitely take notes with your computer as he is speaking, because there's a lot write down. However, if you do the readings, you'll be perfectly fine. For me, I found the readings boring because I didn't like the primary source language, so they took me a long time to do, but I guess that made it easier for me to remember the material.
The midterm and final both consisted of vocab and essay(s). The vocab was easy enough if you took good notes during his lecture. He gives you the vocab list a week before the midterm/final, and he also holds a review session where you ask him questions, so definitely make sure you go to that. If the vocab word is a specific event or something that happened at a specific point, try to remember the date or at least the decade. The essays were really easy as long as you did the readings, understand the vocab, and answer the weekly questions.
This class, although not the most riveting in my opinion, was easy and you can definitely get an A if you put in the work. The professor is super nice, too.

As an Engineering major, let me preface this review by saying that I wanted to avoid humanities as MUCH as possible. So I saw this class, and I was like, "Ooh it says science lmao ok." This class was definitely not what I expected, however, but not in a bad way at all. Basically, you go through the history of science starting from the philosophy of Aristotle, and only ending at Newton. So basically, you're not gonna be learning about like modern science past Newton. It's literally the origins and BEGINNING of how science actually came to be.

And it wasn't bad at all, really. I thought that it was moderately interesting, albeit I was basically falling asleep in the lectures, but that's because I was just tired and it was a 2pm class. The lectures are pretty easy to get the concepts though, so even with minimal paying attention, you can still learn the stuff. You do have to keep up with taking notes though, there can be quite a bit of information. One thing that was great about this class was that there are NO essays at all, only a midterm and a final. Also, there are weekly readings and one question about them that you gotta write about half a page about. It's not that bad.

Alexander can oftentimes go off on tangents that are not important to the class material, but those are good times to kinda catch up on typing notes, or to take a little break and just listen to him. They can be interesting. The midterm and final are essays and definitions, and are pretty easy, just reviewing notes is enough to study for it.

I wouldn't choose to take the class again, but as a GE I would take it again if I had to take a GE.

This class was pretty laid back in the online format. One reading response per week and three essays in total comprise your whole grade. I'd recommend it for someone who has an otherwise heavy course load, or if you are interested in the Scientific Revolution in general. The readings are a mixed bag in my opinion. Some explain the information really well, but some are really banal and not really necessary to understand what is going on. That especially goes for many of the assigned primary sources readings. Thankfully, the book I rented already had key ideas highlighted. It made my work so much easier.

Lectures were pretty interesting, but the slides has basically no words on it, so you may need to review the lecture recording more than once. Prof is a pretty good speaker and tries his best to make the content interesting. I found the content itself to be somewhat interesting, but nothing special. There were weekly readings, with a single paragraph response every week. The readings themselves were really dry and kind of hard to understand (mostly the primary source readings). This definitely was my least favorite part of the class, but it was bearable. Midterm was a single 3-4 page essay due over 1 week, and final was two 2-3 page essays due over 1 week. Both had several topics to choose from, which were pretty easy to write on (the prompts provided a lot of questions, so the essays were basically guided for you). Overall, the class was not bad, with the main complaint being the really shitty weekly readings.

Super easy GE. Never watched a lecture, just skimmed the readings each week which was more than enough for the weekly responses (like 150 words) and the papers (3-4 page midterm and two 2-3 page papers for final). TAs grade everything so talk in discussion and get them to like you.