Ok I have a sense of obligation for posting this after seeing all of these reviews. No, Cusack is not as bad as people are making her out to be on this website. I don’t know how she structured old classes but now the class has you break up weekly into small groups to discuss the big soil survey with your peers. Having a week-to-week check in definitely encouraged me to work on it intermittently throughout the quarter and get advice from people with a similar climate about how to do something. The last class before the final we even had a small peer-editing session where we brought are papers in and traded them in pairs. True, she doesn’t give a lot of tips in class about how to navigate the Web Soil Survey database, but if you invest some time into examining it, it’s not as bad as people make it out to seem. The soil worksheet is probably actually harder than the assignment itself, don’t slack of on doing it and set aside a good amount of time to invest into it. It’s also NOT TRUE that lectures do not help you with the soil survey. She really clearly delicates all of the facets you would have to consider to make a agriculture, forestry, pasture, rangeland, etc plan and we went over a list of things to include in our plans a few times. She would even tailor how much she talked about a certain management topic depending on how many people were going to discuss it in their soil surveys. Personally, I actually kind of enjoyed the assignment. I would recommend picking an area that is known for having a lot of locally produced crops/meat/etc because it will be easier to choose an area for examination later (Oregon and Washington are really good for this). The project takes a lot of time in terms of research, but writing it is very easy once you have done the work. I wouldn’t worry about reaching the page limit — it’s actually a lot more concise than you think. If you want to work in a big picture land-use planning capacity I would definitely recommend this class for you. I feel like I definitely learned a lot from Cusack because she is a REALLY GOOD lecturer. She knows the material so well she can just write it on the board and doesn’t need to read it off a page (very impressive). She’s also able to break down confusing topics in a digestible way. She’s not the warmest professor I’ve ever had but she’s by no means bad. In terms of testing (one midterm and one final), Cusack purposely gives you a longer MC exam (80 questions) but then curves the test A LOT given how the class did. She is willing to make the highest score a 100% and curve from there or even make a median-ish score 100% so people can even get above 100%: the testing definitely isn’t unfair either. If you go to class and pay attention, I wouldn’t recommend reading the textbook: it’s pretty dry and doesn’t say anything better than she does. Only do it unless you just really can’t remember something from class. Props to one of my classmates who found it as a free pdf online. Yeah the midterm guides are bare bones but at least she gives you any sort of guidance about what to study — our class created a google doc and worked on it collectively. Pro tips: when testing, Cusack loves to show you a picture and ask you questions about what type of soil it is or what practice is being shown so try to memorize material like that. Also she puts NON MANDATORY barrier quizzes on ccle which you can take until you get 100%. Actually do these because she will include the same questions on her exams. I feel like this class deserves a better overall evaluation than what’s here right now. I know that I’m just one person, but I do feel like this review is a pretty accurate and fair assessment of the class. So there ya go! From my experience to yours I wish you luck on your UCLA journey lol

Selling textbook for geog 107. Text me at **********.

I am a geography major and Prof Cusack is possibly the WORST professor I've taken at UCLA thus far.
Her lectures were actually quite informative and organized, but none of the material she presented were pertinent to her exams or the class project! The class had 1 proctored online mid-term, 1 individual term project (Soil Survey), and 1 proctored online final (non-cumulative). Additionally, she has set barrier quizzes to access the next week's material on CCLE. She does provide a study guide, but it is extremely vague and not actually helpful in preparing for the exams. You're better off reviewing ALL of your class notes instead and re-reading the book. The worst part of the class was the term project. The expectation for the project was extremely unclear and straight-up confusing! She introduced the project week 3, but much of the information/knowledge we need to complete the project had not yet been taught to us yet. Whenever we would ask for clarification, she would just redirect us on where to find the information or would sound really catty (ie. "as I mentioned several times in class..." or "per my last email..."). Pretty much the entire duration of the project, everyone in the class would ask another student for help. It was a classic example of the blind leading the blind. No one knew what they were doing, or if they were doing it right, and everyone had a different interpretation of the instructions.
I absolutely do not recommend taking this class with this professor unless you are genuinely interested in the topic and are willing to teach yourself how to do a proper Soil Survey.... The only positive I can say about this class is that it forced my introverted-self to make fellow geography-major friends.

Honestly, she's a great person and I can tell she is passionate about what she teaches, but this class is just so disjointed. She acts as if we are grad students who have done this before, but seeing as there is no pre-req to be in this class, it's essentially an intro class to land management and soil & water conservation practices. She does not treat it as such. She even said so, when she said she knows how to grade a land management plan because she's been doing it for 5 years and wrote them all through grad school. Well hate to break it to you, but we aren't in grad school. I personally, and I know most other students, have never worked with soil surveys or written a land management plan.

The lectures are definitely instructional and I like how she writes on the board. But she covers about 5% of what we need to know when concerning the soil surveys, the land management plan, and the exams. I learned most of my knowledge through google and hours upon hours of trial and error, and I am not paying to go to a school where I teach myself everything.

Literally students are teaching students in this class. Most of the times I asked questions she just told me to ask someone in the class. There was a plethora of questions about the land management plan throughout the quarter and her main response was "ask someone else" or "google it". Awesome students posted on the discussion thread how to do what and their experiences, and that was super helpful. Eventually, during 9th week, she finally posted a worksheet that explains how to use the web soil survey website that was causing students so much pain. Note, the land management plan was due that week. I checked it out, and realized she quite literally copy and pasted exactly what students said in the discussions. Again, an example of a student lead class.

She's a really terrible teacher and I don't recommend taking her class.