Currently taking it -- Haanwinckel is a nice guy but TERRIBLE teacher if he's teaching anything for Spring 2022 try ur best to find a different professor. He makes jokes about how many typos there are on his slides, had a question on our midterm where none of the answers were right, consistently puts confusing concepts on slides and then ends it with "you don't have to know this", and overall has trouble putting his thoughts in an intuitive way while teaching. Worst professor I've had at UCLA so far.

This course is the worst one I have taken, and I will never retake this course and other courses with this professor again. He is trying to find the luckiest man in the class through his terrible and hard tests. I thought I was a good student with a good gpa before taking his class. However, after taking the class, I feel like the professor ruined my gpa and all of my expectations about future. During the tests, I was trying to guess which choice he would put the correct answer on. It was like a statistic test instead of an Econ test. I don't believe the tests could show how students learned from the course, but just showed who was the luckiest one. Never take the course with this professor. Trust me! You will regret after taking.

do not take this class with haanwinckel... the lectures and problem sets are okay but the exams are just complete guessing games.

nothing in the exams tests any information that you've learned in the class and he's confident that an exam should have an average of 55%. for a class that's triple weighted for your GPA, he screws a LOT of people over. this class is the reason many people have to drop biz econ as a major (due to the GPA requirement) and switch to just econ. i doubt he's going to take students' perspectives into account for the final. considering just not studying for the final since everything is just a guessing game anyway.

Haanwinckel made me switch my profession, lose my interest in pure Economics, doubt my self-ability, and question my belonging at this university. In his most recent class-wide communication (which was in the wake of a midterm with a ~40% average) he stated that he can’t give too many As out to preserve the reputation of UCLA’s Econ department. On his most recent midterm, students reported only being able to reason through ~25% of the questions, with the remainder being guesses. He teaches this class like it’s to PhD students who are aspiring Economists. If this sounds like your deal, then try him out. If not, stay far, far away from his courses. If I had known the class would be like this, I would’ve happy deferred taking 101 to the future. HORRIBLE.

Many Typo and mistakes: The materials he gives students have so many typos, such as in the slides, practice midterms. So, I had to ask the TA if this was a typo or the correct answer every time when I had doubts, which makes the materials so confusing and discourages me from studying. The tests are online with multiple choices but sometimes he forgets to put a correct answer which he only realizes a week after the test, after we all end up spending too much time on that question because there is literally no correct answer.

Luck: The second Midterm average was 7.52 scores out of possible 18 points. and Midterm is all about your guessing and luck because the problems are too difficult and we’d never understand the question. I attended all of the lectures, and did discussion problems, all of the Midterm practice, but still got slightly lower than the average. Like I said earlier, the tests are super disorganized, so it really does come down to luck a lot of the time because of the fact that the correct answer might be wrong, there might be no correct answer, and the problems are so much more difficult than the lecture and example problems that it is insane. So basically you just have to randomly guess and hope you get lucky.

Slides: his slides are not really that helpful for me because it was too abstract, and I don’t get any point from it. I’m not sure if everyone feels this way, but I don’t really end up using the slides when I am working on the actual problems.

I am taking this prof currently in winter 2022. He is one of the nicest professors I have had, so I was kinda hesitant to write about it, but for your sake, I wrote my true feelings.

Haanwinckel is genuinely a nice person, passionate about economics, and pretty funny - I really wanted to like him and this class. However, his lectures were so poorly explained relative to the difficulty of the concepts and problems we'd later encounter on exams, that what little I did end up learning came from YouTube. If you must take this class, I suggest getting a head start binge watching William Spaniel videos on game theory, because you will inevitably resort to that during the quarter when this professor’s instruction deprives you. Haanwinckel has a tendency to overcomplicate topics, and explain ideas that are only tangentially related, to a point where we lose sight of the main things we should be grasping as they relate to actual exam questions. While seeing real world applications was nice, it has no use when the economic intuition that explains them was taught so poorly. I will say, the final third of the class (post-midterm with a 40% average) was taught fairly well, and I wasn’t nearly as confused as in the first 7 weeks, but it was really too little too late. The topics covered here were genuinely interesting, much more so than Econ 11, which is why I'm disappointed that the delivery of them was so bad. Hopefully Haanwinckel improves with more experience, but for now I would not recommend taking Econ 101 with him.

I'm normally a straight-A student and I put a lot of effort into studying to maintain that, however, this class is the type where it's absolutely impossible to study for. I scored around 30% on the second midterm, which had a class average of about 40%, which is absolutely insane. I took Econ 11 last quarter with Mazzocco and got an A without the curve, yet I could barely pass the exams in this class. Although incredibly nice, Professor Hannwinckel is the worst professor I have ever met. After receiving numerous complaints about the difficulty of the exams, he basically told the class that life was hard and that he couldn't hand out free A's. If he refused to adjust the difficulty level of his exams, he should've at least provided more study guides, assigned problem sets that actually resembled the exams, OR actually teach us the material and concepts that he'd test us on. But he did none of those. I actually had to guess on about 2/3 of all the exams, except the final, which I'm positive he only made easier because he was afraid of evaluations or something. The amount of time he gives you on each exam doesn't even matter because you won't even know where to start. Only 6% of the class scored about 67%!!! A lot of people had to change their majors from Business Econ to Econ, so I definitely don't recommend the class with Hannwinckel!!

Avoid taking econ 101 with this professor if possible. I felt like I would have gotten the same grade whether or not I studied for his exams or not.

Let me start off by saying, he’s a nice guy to converse with, but the class is a mess. Exams are full of mistakes and extremely difficult. No matter how much I studied, I never felt prepared for his midterms/final.

He definitely does not provide slides/lectures that clearly articulate the content. Although he’s a nice guy to converse with, his attitude towards his students is extremely discouraging, and quite unprofessional. He was never straightforward about how to prepare for his exams, and proceeded to brush off the failing average of both midterms.

This class ruined my GPA. The professor is a nice and genuine guy but the way he structured the class was very messed up. As someone who had a relatively easy time taking Econ 11, Econ 101 recked my self-esteem. Regardless of how much studying, I would've ended with the same score mainly because of how his midterms were different from the lecture and practice sets. Stay away from this professor. The only thing fair was the final.