Professor Brown is an amazing professor but for a four-unit class, there was quite a bit of work including lab work. The assignments in the class included: lecture activities, lab quizzes, lab assignments, two lab practicals, a midterm and final, and a scientific writing assignment. Lectures were podcasted and were helpful to just listen to as lecture attendance wasn't mandatory but attending lectures made it easier to complete the lecture activities. The hardest part of the class was definitely the labs which required looking at a lot of fossils and understanding details about them and their geologic time period placements. This was definitely the hardest part of the course and some earth science knowledge could be very useful but not required at all. Our TA was super sweet and always willing to help but grading on the lab reports can be a bit harsh at times as only a few questions were graded for correctness and needed very specific details for answers which can dock you quite a few points. Lab practicals were somewhat difficult since some of the fossils are ones that you may have not seen before and you are expected to explain in detail what you are looking at or how it relates to the geological time scale. You are expected to have the geologic timeline memorized very early on in the class but it comes with practice over time. Regular class exams were surprisingly fairer and easier than I thought and they were just based on main themes or details from her slides and learning objectives and were noncumulative. Overall, this class is quite a bit of work for being a 4-unit class with a lab so if you want an easier or lighter lab class to take, then take another one. However, this class ended up being more interesting than I thought and was just a lot of busy work but the grading scheme was very forgiving and you can do well in this class!

I would argue that this class, although very engaging and comparably less difficult than other Science GEs, is not the SUPER easy-A GE that it is made out to be on Bruinwalk. This class requires lots of memorization: you are responsible for knowing different lineages of dinosaurs, be able to identify dinosaurs based on very niche specific tooth-shapes and skull-shapes, recall long dinosaur names, and be able to match any given dinosaur to its location on Pangea and the time frame it lived in. Lectures are engaging (though they are recorded) and Professor Brown is super nice and intelligent! Every TA is also extremely well-informed and resourceful, I would highly recommend office hours. I would consider the weekly labs to be difficult at times because they involve the observation of many different dinosaur fossils, and some lab questions are completely guess-based and hypothetical. So as someone who likes when there is one right science-based answer, it was difficult to guess. There are weekly quizzes on Bruinwalk based on the textbook readings (which can be taken as many times as one wants until they get their ideal scores). There are also 5 or 6 lab quizzes based on the labs, which can only be taken once (and I find these to be a little more on the difficult side).