Take this class if you would love to be completely immersed into the 2000 years of Ancient Chinese Civilization. Take this if you want to dream about Chinese emperors and Chinese culture only. Take this if the only requirement you need left is in this one class and in this one class only.... If you would like to live, breathe, eat, think, and exist solely on Chinese history, take this class. All of the above must apply to you unless you want to fail this class. Otherwise, this class is NOT the dao.

Professor is very passionate about subject and you can tell. Props to him.

A Word of Warning: CHIN50 is a Nightmare Dressed Like a Survey Course

If you think CHIN50 will offer a structured, insightful exploration of Chinese history, be prepared for a serious wake-up call. This class ambitiously attempts to cover everything from pseudo-fictional ancient dynasties to the communist revolution, creating a historical scope so broad that it's practically unmanageable for anyone with a typical course load—let alone for engineering students like myself, whose upper-division courses combined require less time than this one class.

The quizzes are the pinnacle of absurdity. They’re closed book and closed notes, which would be fine if they focused on significant historical figures and major events. Instead, we’re expected to recall obscure names, sometimes mentioned only once in the textbook. I actually went back to confirm: one sentence. That’s all we got on this “important” figure who somehow ended up as a focal point on the quiz. The questions are worded so ambiguously that even if you know the material, you’re left second-guessing yourself, hoping that you've deciphered what the instructor actually meant.

And then there’s the grading—glacially slow, to the point where feedback is irrelevant by the time it’s finally returned. Assignments pile up, and while you're still waiting on your quiz grade from a month ago, you’re asked to prepare for the next quiz over another ludicrously large chunk of history.

To anyone considering taking CHIN50: reconsider. Unless you’re ready to put more effort into this course than all your upper-division classes combined, or if you enjoy memorizing throwaway details over substantive learning, do yourself a favor and avoid it. There are better ways to gain an appreciation for Chinese history than being dragged through a scattershot mess like this.

Overall, I enjoyed this class. Although I wouldn't consider it an "easy" GE, if you do the work, you should be fine. I took it as a GE and didn't have too high hopes for it, but Dr. Schaberg's lectures were very interesting and he cares about our learning. There were 30 pages of textbook and/or sourcebook reading assigned before each class, which I found helpful but time-consuming. There were 5 in-lecture quizzes (closed book) and 5 discussion quizzes (open book), neither of which are too bad if you've been attending lectures and doing the reading. Discussion is mandatory, but if you have Quentin as your TA, it's very enjoyable—he's funny.

The midterm was short-answer and essay questions in-class, closed book, and I studied a lot for it; using Quizlets to review the dynasties was particularly helpful since it covered 3000 years of Chinese history. There was a final group/individual project that involved writing a few pages on any topic related to the class. The final was in-person on Canvas, which wasn't too bad (I studied a few days in advance), though if not for the protests it would have been just a longer version of the midterm. Good luck :)

Prof. Schaberg's lectures are disorganized and his instructions on exams are even more unclear. There were about 40 pages of reading each week which were manageable but tedious (the textbook was written poorly imo), and the exams were pretty much all closed book, closed internet. If I'm not Chinese I would've struggled a lot more in this class.

PLEASE do not take this class. Coming into this class as a freshman, I didn't know what to expect for the average workload of a GE. I quickly realized that 30+ pages of reading two times a week, pop quizzes on said readings sometimes with prior notice (on the MOST OBSCURE TOPICS that are barely relevant in Chinese history), and an 8-page final paper IN ADDITION to a written in-class short-answer/essay final exam is not normal for a GE. Also, the instructions for literally anything in this class are so unclear. Professor Schaberg hadn't even clarified what to go over for the exam -- I had assumed that I had to study all 2000+ years of Chinese history, until he told us a few days before the exam we only had to study material from after the midterm, so only about 1000 years ! If you ever want a clear answer on prompts for papers or just anything in general, good luck getting it. Being confused is normal, but at least the TA's are angels (mostly.) I wish I had taken Intro to Buddhism or literally anything else, because this class caused me way too much stress. TBH, I can tell that the professor really loves Chinese history and is super sweet, but he's just such a bad lecturer. He jumps from topic to topic, and it's hard to follow along because he'll go on tangents all the time. Naturally, he spends a lot of time on things he enjoys talking about. Because of this, he spent two weeks on antiquity (very, very early China), and spent two minutes on WW2 and the CCP in the last lecture. I'm just thankful the quarter is over. So, so thankful. I like to think that this class was conditioning and I will be cruising from here on out.

DO NOT TAKE THIS COURSE THINKING IT'S A FREE GE!
As an incoming freshman, I thought that this would be an interesting and easy GE, since I do like studying about Chinese civilization. First, this class is a history class; a very poorly organized one. You are assigned around 30 pages of reading before each class, but the textbook is so densely written and poorly organized that those 30 pages will take more than 2 hours if you want to understand and process it. The timeline of events is not chronological sometimes, meaning it jumps around. If it was just these readings then this wouldn't be as bad as I make it sound. But instead, professor Schaberg assigns pop quizzes every week on these readings. First few times the quizzes were okay. Then he starts quizzing us on a European painter that was mentioned in one line out of the 30 pages. He emphasized that this course wasn't going to be a memorization-based one by the way! Next quiz was asking us about specific dates. So now, the readings become much more stressful. Schaberg also does not prepare us well during lectures. Each slideshow he uploads online for us is essentially a useless one; it contains maybe 1 sentence of info per couple of slides. His lecture notes is a script instead of actual notes, so good luck deciphering that. We are also kept in the dark about how the final project and exam is structured. There is no study guide (until a classmate emailed him in which he obliged, 160 terms released a couple days before the exam), and we ddin't know the format of the final exam until very last minute. Even the TAs didn't know, thus they had to guess (incorrectly) about the format, which ended up being a interview on paper. (The TAs, at least Quentin, is great and he really tried his hardest for us, so thanks Quentin!) Our final project's instructions were convoluted, thus he had to clarify 2-3 times in lecture and upload an example of a project (which wasn't really an example since it was 1/4th completed) for us to have an hazy idea on what he wanted. For a GE, this class just seems too stressful, and hopefully my future GEs won't be like this.

Professor Schaberg is undoubtedly very passionate and knowledgeable about the course. However, this course was immensely and disproportionately difficult to succeed in. Professor Schaber's lectures are extremely difficult to follow, and I usually find more guidance and can extract more information from the textbook. While he is passionate about the subject, he often hyper-fixates on topics that are not fully relevant to the focus of the lecture or the course itself. It doesn't help that the course has a scope beyond imagination and covers almost the entirety of Chinese history in itself. The course should either cover a long period generally or focus on a short period in detail - not cover a very long timeline in intense depth. The scope of the course is entirely unmanageable, especially because most students take this class to fulfil GE requirements. Out of all the courses I have taken, this one has been the most difficult to succeed in and leaves me the most anxiety-stricken. If Professor Schaberg had more consideration for students' learning and success, he could narrow down the scope of the course to what is more manageable for students learning this subject at entry level and ensure that his lecturing is more effective. The lecture slides have little to no information on them, usually just pictures and dates. The lecture notes are entirely ineligible and are helpful only to the lecturer, not to students. This is detrimental to students' success because the resources provided to us (lecture notes and slides) are not at all helpful when studying because they offer no guidance. The lecture slides should have more information on them so that students can easily and effectively take note of key ideas instead of trying desperately to take down scraps of what the professor is saying in real-time (and having no other reference to what was mentioned in the lecture afterwards - which is why it is impossible to miss lecture in this class). Professor Schaberg also offers little guidance when students have questions about quizzes or exams and answers in very vague terms. It is extremely difficult to study for and feel confident in an exam when I have no clue about the structure of the exam and can only rely on myself, the textbook, and external sources to guide my studying, especially considering how the grading for the course is so arbitrary. While the TAs and the professor make themselves available through office hours and the times before and after lectures, it is hard to advocate for myself when I'm so lost in the course that I don't even have a clue about where to start or what exactly I need help with. Professor Schaberg sometimes communicates with us through announcements on Bruinlearn with information for quizzes, projects, or exams. I appreciate how he holds up to his promise to never give quizzes without telling us ahead of time. However, it is crucial that he is more detailed in his explanation of the structure of quizzes/exams and that he gives a clear overview of what he expects of us instead of providing obscure and vague answers. The grading is very slow and definitely arbitrary, with variances in the quizzes that each TA gives to their respective discussion sections and how those quizzes count towards the final grade, demonstrating a clear issue of equity. It is difficult to extract any value from this course when I can't even keep up with anything that we are taught because there is an unmanageable amount of content that is covered and not enough effort put into ensuring that students understand the content. Ideally, lectures should be coordinated with the textbook, covering the same topics and going through the history in chronological order. Also, the emphasis should be on guiding students to extrapolate the key ideas from important events in history, not rushing through thousands of years of history in such a way that students are grasping at strings trying to memorise as much as they can because we don't know what we need to know and what we don't (the consensus is that we need to know everything, so we study everything and yet some tiny, miniscule detail we didn't catch onto ends up in the quiz). I was not particularly interested in the course beforehand, and I certainly had not developed any interest in the subject at the end of the quarter. I don't believe that I have retained any information from the course because it was all simply too much to handle. This class is unarguably difficult relative to other courses, which is not fair for a GE course. The workload is way too overwhelming, required readings are lengthy and packed with information that isn't even fully covered in lectures, and graded materials and examinations are not designed for students' success.

Going into this course I expected it to be challenging but this class far exceeds the difficulty of every course I have taken at UCLA combined. I actually spend 10 times the amount of hours doing assigned readings and studying for incredibly niche quizzes compared to my other two upper division courses. Keeping in mind that this is a GE. We are expected to not just know but entirely master and memorize over 12,000 years of recorded Chinese history. This class is simply absurd and contains the most incoherent lecturing I've ever had to experience in my lifetime. Learning how to walk for the first time has to be easier than listening to and understanding an entire lecture. The material is all over the place in lectures. The professor bounces around different time periods and dynasties, electing to ramble about something 500 years in the future before returning back to the main topic which frankly might not even exist. The professor hyper fixates on minute details so much that it has actually caused us to be behind in lectures relative to the reading we have done. The most appalling of which was being having to read 5000 years in the future just for the lecture to be on something we read last week. This makes lectures incredibly painful to endure and leaves you questioning reality as the time period jumping mashes so much random information together. These are solely the lecture issues. The next comes with the assigned quizzes. The quizzes must be designed for those with the top one percentile of IQ in the entire world because they focus on the most minor details known to man. The quizzes will consist of 2 questions: one thats more manageable and one that literally has been mentioned only in one sentence in the entire book. Yes I've checked, only once. This leaves you with a 50% at best if you're lucky, or if you're a genius that can memorize a 700 page textbook from cover to cover then maybe you'll scape out a 100%. Worse than this however was a quiz in which the question was regarding a date that was again only mentioned once but not just that, the date was only mentioned in the caption in the textbook margin. No where else in the main text was this date and event mentioned. These issues are only for lecture quizzes, the discussion quizzes carry a burden of their own. Preceding any comments on the discussion quizzes, it is important to note a lack of equity in this course. Upon talking to other students in different discussion sections it came to my attention that the quizzes were entirely different for each discussion section. And not just different as in a different version with similar question, no, entirely different formats. In my discussion section were given 30 mins to interpret two random Chinese poems we were never familiar with and graded on an incredibly difficult scale. This bore issues as not only was the material not relevant to the course material in the textbook, the grading scale was so beyond difficult even considering we just got a poem thrown at us. Worse than this I received a comment of "excellent" on one of my quizzes that I scored a 7/10 on. I am unsure in which world a 70% is considered excellence but it is not this one. If this doesn't show how concerning this class was I dont know what will because I am not familiar with a course in which 70% scores are celebrated. Excellent should imply an excellent score or an "A". There is so little communication that there is nothing to strive for. You reach out and grab nothing time and time again. To make matters worse, other discussion sections received far easier quizzes that didnt test them on their knowledge of ancient chinese poetry and were even graded on completion. If there weren't enough issues the lack of equity is just the tip of the iceberg. I certainly would never in a million years recommend this class to any given person at UCLA or in the world for this matter. This is by far the worst and most difficult course I have ever taken and brought upon so many issues I wish that no one has to ever experience again. It would honestly be a blessing from if this class were to be removed entirely from the school entirely. It has brought upon enough damage to one group of students, it would be a benefit to society if no one else ever had to even know this course existed.

I did fine in this class, but it was a nightmare. For one, you have to cover 3000+ years of Chinese history, memorizing minute details from each dynasty. The lectures are scattered and disorganized and the slides aren't helpful (if there are any for that day).

The midterm and final are basically IDs and an essay in person, which require intense studying and again -- memorization. Don't remember a random short story from the Tang Dynasty on a test that covers 700 AD to present? Sorry, five points off. There are also maybe six? lecture quizzes which are also hard ID.

Pray you have a reasonable TA, all mine focused on was Chinese poetry -- and we had 7 in-section quizzes where you 1) read a poem for the first time and 2) answer a short answer question about it -- all within 15 minutes. These weren't easy questions either, one time the TA asked about synecdoche in the poem.

Maybe the saving grace of the class is the relatively easy final project. It's just a 5 or 6 page paper talking about representations (doesn't have to be scholarly) of a Chinese historical figure, event, or idea. Although, mine hasn't been graded yet.

TLDR: don't take this class, fortunately I'm a senior history major and had the time to do well in the class, if you're someone who wouldn't have the time to study and CLOSELY do all the readings and lectures -- don't take this class

class was painful. readings long. quizzes obscure. all the life and energy i once had has completely escaped me (hence this review). has both final exam AND essay. be sure you know the europeans in chinese history too and a year-by-year breakdown of thousands of years of history. if you love impulsiveness and no planning, maybe you'd like this class. the groupme was the only thing that kept my seatbelt buckled on the way to class, otherwise, i'd probably keep it unbuckled so fate can decide whether or not i deserve to hear about the yuan dynasty.