Like the other reviews, there were often times I raised my eyebrow at some of Jewitt’s remarks. However, I found myself watching his lectures less as the quarter progresses. His slides are pretty informative and include a lot of information, so I depended solely on those and ended up doing fine in the class. The weekly lab/quizzes were pretty difficult. He gives 10 minutes for 8 questions, which is a pretty tight time limit. The midterms and final were CCLE tests. They weren’t as hard as the weekly quizzes in my opinion. He gives several chances for extra credit. I ended up not doing the extra credit report, but that would have been worth 5% of your grade, which is pretty hefty. Overall, I think the material is difficult as a non-LS major (I’m an Arts student), but with studying and learning the material, doing all of the EC, getting an A is pretty doable.

Overall, this class was ok. The way the midterms, final, and quizzes were worded made things very tricky. Also, I felt at times that if I didn't have an environmental science background, I'd be struggling to keep up with his teaching. His prerecorded lectures took a long time but he was very generous in his extra credits (like previous comments it can make or break your grade). That being said, I highly recommend doing every extra credit opportunity possible. I do agree that he probably wasn't going to make accommodations for this class (due to BLM) until he was pressed by ucla to do so. Anyways, keep up with the lectures, know the lab stuff, do the quizzes and extra credits and you should be fine.

It was an okay class. Not too difficult, but you do have to be on top of things. Extra credit was fairly simple and definitely saved my grade. Quizzes and tests in general were quite tricky. There were always questions purposefully made for you to mess up (strange wording, numbers, etc).
Now onto David Jewitt. Definitely a white man that says he's not racist because he has a Black friend or an Asian wife. Since the beginning I felt there was something off about him in that respect, but I tried to ignore it. Made weird comments about Chinese people. Also sent out a couple of slightly insensitive emails regarding protesting of George Floyd's death. I say slightly because it might not have been obvious to non POCs. Kind of like an email microagression if that makes sense. Definitely would not have accommodated to students if UCLA hadn't made him. One of those professors who argued it was racist to be sensible to black students during this time.

The course is definitely an easy and interesting GE. Professor Jewitt is a really nice professor and he explains all the course materials very clearly. The test and quiz questions are, however, sometimes very tricky. Overall, it's a nice course to take.
However, I did not enjoy the course throughout the quarter. Just as the last comments said, he gives too many comments on current and past political issues with his own opinion and emotions. Though his wife is Chinese, his comments toward some past events in China and the example about China and Chinese people he used to example some concepts during class are a little bit aggressive and made me feel really uncomfortable.
Maybe he just likes to share whatever he thinks, but he didn't do a good job at thinking about what his students, especially maybe Chinese students, in this case, would feel when he gives some comments.

Professor David deserves an overall rate of 5, BUT I only gave him a 3, with the fact that there're too much political comments in this class, especially some biased ones. For instance, his opinions about China are largely biased, despite the fact that his wife is a Chinese (in fact, his bias might come from his wife). With stressing the importance of scientific thinking, he didn't really try to know China in a comprehensive and critical way, but only adopt the information from his wife. His knowledge about oceanography is abundant, but he really shouldn't include that much political topics in this class.

the class itself is great and I definitely learned a lot. I was never actually interested in oceanography but it ended up being really fun, especially because he often brought in a lot of other topics related to the oceans. he gives a lot of extra credit that's fairly easy to do (this quarter, I think we got 8 or 9 points of extra credit max, and the entire class is out of 100 points), and the labs aren't hard. all the exams are multiple choice, and they're not too difficult. for the final, he reused a lot of questions from the midterms. he did go over time in lecture two or three times but I ended up not minding because the lectures were interesting. that being said, professor jewitt can be very opinionated at times and will bring up something political every once in a while. otherwise, he's a good lecturer, and if you like slightly crazy people I would recommend taking him. our class has seen him 1) drink from a clorox container 2) calculate the covid-19 fatality rates of his fellow faculty 3) play a video of bear grylls squeezing juice out of elephant dung as a "last resort" water source, which he prefaced by saying he was going to show us what could happen if we don't figure out how to desalinate sea water.

Best Professor here at UCLA
Take his class and you will not regret it.

I’m an ecology major who took this class to fulfill a lower div requirement for my minor. The content wasn’t particularly interesting to me, but I thought the class was decent as a whole.
I only watched around 3 of the lectures, since the slides were posted anyway and were relatively detailed. He had a huge tendency to go off on tangents and discuss irrelevant topics. The content was relatively straightforward, and I learned it well enough from the slides.
Because I didn’t really watch the lectures, I can’t really speak to how he was as a whole—apparently he did make quite a few questionably racist/bigoted remarks.
The grading was extremely generous:
-There was just under 10% of extra credit—essentially a whole letter grade. The extra credit was extremely easy. There were several opportunities with the labs and one big opportunity with a report; both took little time. If you do it, it’s very hard to get a bad grade.
-Labs: Didn’t go to a single session, since they were basically do the activity with other people and weren’t required. They consisted of posting a short reply on a discussion forum (takes like 5 min and was 20% of your lab score), and a quiz that was 80% of your lab score. The quizzes were sometimes worded really weirdly, and since labs make up 35% of your grade, they can hurt you if you don’t do well. I think I averaged an 85% on them or so.
-Tests: the rest of your grade was tests, which were two midterms (10% each) and a final (45%). Like the quizzes, questions were often worded weirdly, and I remember looking at a few questions confused on where it was discussed in the content that was covered. I did decently well on them, as they weren’t particularly challenging, but they weren’t the easiest to take.

Overall I’d recommend the class if it fulfills a credit you need based on the fact that it has an obscene amount of extra credit. Getting good grades on exams wasn’t the easiest, and I felt indifferent towards learning about the material. However, it is was extremely easy to get a good grade and had a decent amount of available resources.

Do not buy the textbooks! I bought 1 of the books and did not open it the entire quarter. The midterm and final are based off of lecture, slides, and lab. I got Bs on both midterms and the final and still ended the class with an A+ — the extra credit really helps!! The tests are not too hard, but there are some trick questions in there so make sure to read questions carefully. Because class was online, he posted all the lectures (no live zooms). Labs were in person and were mainly there to ask questions about the activity. Would highly recommend and the content is interesting!!
Grade is based off of lab quizzes (lowest grade is dropped), 2 midterms, and final. I had TA Xiyuan and he was very helpful!!

Easy A but can be frustrating b/c of those stupid lab quizzes and exams that had some impossible questions to answer. I think the breakdown of the grade was something like 35% lab grade, and 20% midterm grade, and 45% final grade (not completely sure). Although the lowest lab quiz grade got dropped, the quizzes were often very challenging; like they were usually manageable as long as you watched the lab video (I did not watch a single lecture video before my midterm and gave up watching them for my final), but some of the quizzes really messed me up and were stressful. You also have to post on the discussion forum w/ the answer to your TA's question of the week which was annoying but easy as long as you used the Internet lol. Honestly, the only reason why I (and majority of the class) enrolled in this class was b/c of the 30% extra credit he gives out normally, but for this class, he only gave out 10% (5 for completing these easy 3 assignments and 5 for writing a whole 5 page-ish report) which is still good but disappointing. The midterms were easy b/c most of the questions were similar to the ones in the quizzlets I studied before, but the final was super challenging for me and it took me such a long time to finish b/c not only you were only given 75 mins for 60 questions, but also the questions were genuinely hard. I surprisingly did great on the final, and with the 5% extra credit, I ended up w/ an A+, but idk man the content didn't completely intrigue me, and the final being worth almost half of the course grade seemed ridiculous to me. Also, Jewitt didn't really seem to really care about his students; he often got political during his lectures and sent out emails that contained some insensitive comments about the BLM movement. Jewitt kinda seemed to be pissed about the whole movement and him having to accommodate the final due to it. Overall, an easy class to get an A as long as you put in some effort, but I didn't really enjoy the class that much.