Gavin is great. I would 10/10 take a class with him again. Even though sometimes it's unclear what he's talking about, he's energetic and extremely approachable. The entire grade is based on 2 papers, but they consider improvement and also going to discussion boosts your grade. If you want to know what's going on in class, you should probably do the readings, but I seldom did the readings and still did fine.

I took 100A, C153B, and 151A with Lawrence. He's definitely bright, and it shows in his lectures. A lot of the information you learn in lecture is irrelevant to the midterm/final, but it is interesting nonetheless.

I wouldn't say that his classes were easy, but they also weren't too demanding. Your entire grade consists of a take-home midterm and a take-home final, which are usually about 5 pgs each. Lawrence's classes don't require that much work in the grand scheme of things, but his prompts are fairly challenging. In terms of overall difficulty, I would say his classes are average among upper-division philosophy courses. I have no clue what his grade distributions look like, though.

I also think that Lawrence is a really nice guy. In 151A, I had an issue with one of my TA's whom I felt gave me a much lower grade than I deserved. When I discussed the matter with Lawrence, I was impressed with his willingness to listen to my concern. He agreed to regrade my paper, and the new grade he gave me was definitely fair. He also let me switch TA's 7 weeks through the quarter to prevent awkwardness between my original TA and me.