I despised this class, I would highly advise to avoid taking it with Professor Rajagopal. The content could have been interesting and useful, especially if you are considering going into environmental consulting or related fields. However, the lectures were all over the place. The Professor was flat-out bad at explaining the content and often lost his track of thought. The homeworks were hard and graded harshly, so it sucked not learning anything in the class lectures. I ended up having to go to as many TA office hours as I could to understand the homework. Professor Rajagopal was not approachable or accommodating, and he criticized me several times in lecture which was super uncomfortable. I would not recommend this class.

He means well, but ultimately the lectures felt very disorganized. However, the topic of life cycle assessment itself is, as it seems, a difficult and hand-wavy topic to teach. It's very approximate and requires a lot of different averages and assumptions that don't necessarily reflect real life. A lot of accounting, basically. Professor Rajagopal is really helpful on the homework in office hours, but lecture concepts during lecture were really confusing. He also would change his mind about logistical things like the midterm and final, which was frustrating (like scheduling a final when there was none on the registrar, or changing the allotted time we could take our midterm from 8AM-11:59PM to 8AM-10:15AM).

The class was structured well, with five homeworks at the beginning of the quarter that took about 2-3 hours (or less) each (one per week), and then a group project that the latter half of the quarter focused on. I was blessed with a good group, so this was pretty smooth, but the topic itself wasn't very interesting.

Overall, I wouldn't take this class again.

I enjoyed this class, the concepts presented on life-cycle assessment were super interesting and helpful, especially for job applications. In this class, we learned primarily about Process LCA and EIOLCA. We also learned about calculating present costs for cost-benefit analysis and sustainable business. I will warn that the the homework assignments are very quite time-consuming and somewhat tedious. The professor is clearly passionate about LCA, but I feel his lectures are somewhat disorganized. Tests are fair if you study and review the material taught in class. I would recommend taking it if you are interested in corporate sustainability. However, do not expect this to be an easy Environmental elective.

Overall I did actually like this class and Professor Rajagopal. There are a lot of harsh reviews on here but if LCA is something that you really are interested in then I recommend this class. I want to go into corporate sustainability so we were actually learning exactly the stuff that I hope to use later on. I was excited to be able to put LCA on my resume and Professor Rajagopal even gave me a recommendation for my application for an EPA Internship which I will be working at this summer. We got to know each other in Office Hours which I highly recommend going to because he will answer questions about the assignments. As a teacher, Rajagopal could be confusing, so I recommend reading the textbook because it will help you understand. He grossly overexplains some things and underexplains others. He spent a whole class basically teaching us unit conversion. Everyone was confused because they though it was some novel thing and didn't get it (yeah, the way he explained it was really bad), but I was just like y'all dw it's just unit conversion lmaoo.

Course setup: Weekly assignment, midterm, final.
The assignments could take a good bit of time. Average for me I would say was 3 hours, but the best was probably 1 and the worst 3 ish were probably closer to 6 7 8. But again, it was material I was interested in so I never dreaded doing them. I got As on all of them except for the first one I think. But I did work hard on them. Then I got like 88s ish or something on the tests, which are not curved.
Study for the tests by going through his slides. Literally just memorize his powerpoints and you'll be good.

I learned a lot in this class and I'm glad I took it and I would take it again. Start on the assignments early.

One of the worst classes I have taken at UCLA. This is for my minor so if you are looking for an engaging environmental class, avoid at all costs. This class requires meticulous detail and tracing lifecycles back to coal production. The homework assignments are frustrating and take hours.